As I write this, the 2016 Election is lurching painfully to its conclusion, with about a week to go. In my entire adult life, dating back to when I first reached the age where I started paying attention to politics in the late 1970s, I cannot remember a more bizarre or painful election, nor can I remember an election in which one possible outcome actually terrifies me. I’m referring to the possibility of Donald Trump becoming our next President. I’ve made no secret of my contempt for his xenophobia, his blatant sexism and misogyny, his change from using racist dog whistles to racist bullhorns, his utter lack of qualifications, his temperament that is totally unfit to be President, and his generally vile personality.

I haven’t really written much about the political reasons that I oppose Trump, but I have written quite a bit about one medical and scientific reason. With one week to go before this election chugs painfully to its freak show conclusion, I was reminded of this just yesterday and figured, what the heck? I really should take one last opportunity to write about this in light of a post that I saw last night, which led me to some Facebook postings by antivaccinationists about Trump.

If there’s one thing you might not realize, it’s that antivaccinationists (at least many of them) love Donald Trump. Love him. For example, our good buddy and antivaccine conspiracy theorist, Jake Crosby, whom I like to refer to as Young Master Crosby (or, if I’m on Twitter, The Gnat), has been posting Hillary for Prison graphics, urging people to donate to the Trump campaign, and generally worshiping the ground Donald Trump walks on. Elsewhere, a man every bit as deranged as The Gnat, Mike Adams, has been delivering a steady stream of pro-Trump propaganda, along with his other pseudoscience, quackery, and lies, for several months now. More recently, the Grand Poobah of the Antivaccine Movement himself, the man who almost singlehandedly brought measles back to the UK by using a crappy fraudulent case report to frighten parents with the lie that the MMR vaccine causes autism, Andrew Wakefield, has stated that this is a “one issue” election:

To be honest, I have a hard time believing that Andrew Wakefield is so stupid that he’d be repeating the utterly risible claim that by 2032 one out of two children will have autism and that the pharmaceutical industry and government somehow want this? Does Wakefield have any self-awareness? Does he have a clue just how stupid that sounds? He probably does, but it’s all about the con, and the antivaccine activists he’s addressing actually believe such flagrant nonsense. In any case, Wakefield strongly endorsed Donald Trump because Trump believes that vaccines cause autism. In fact, he claims to have met with Donald Trump and that Trump told him he’s on Wakefield’s (and, by extension, the antivaccinationists’) side. He then lays down an even bigger whopper, claiming that, if Hillary Clinton is elected President, within two years there will be mandatory vaccination nationwide. Clearly, either Wakefield doesn’t know how our federalist system operates and that it is the states, not the federal government, that determine school vaccination requirements, or he doesn’t care. I suspect the latter. Again, Wakefield is not stupid. He is a liar. But who knows? To be able to make such ridiculously over-the-top claims, he must be, in my opinion, either stupid or lying. Take your pick.

Either way, that Andrew Wakefield supports Donald Trump (even though, as a British citizen, he can’t vote in our election) is not surprising. Donald Trump has been spouting antivaccine tropes, pseudoscience, and nonsense for a long time now. What was far more disturbing to me is that in the video Wakefield claimed to have met with Trump a couple of days before to discuss vaccines and autism. That’s right. If Wakefield is to be believed, the foremost antivaccine conspiracy theorist in the world, who made what is currently the most paranoid conspiracy theory “documentary” right now, met with a major party candidate for President, who told him he shares his views. That frightens me, and it should frighten you, too.

To give you a little more background, I’ve documented Donald Trump’s antivaccine views for a long time now. The first time I took notice of Trump spouting off about vaccines causing autism was in 2007, when he was quoted in an interview saying:

“When I was growing up, autism wasn’t really a factor,” Trump said. “And now all of a sudden, it’s an epidemic. Everybody has their theory. My theory, and I study it because I have young children, my theory is the shots. We’ve giving these massive injections at one time, and I really think it does something to the children.”

And:

“When a little baby that weighs 20 pounds and 30 pounds gets pumped with 10 and 20 shots at one time, with one injection that’s a giant injection, I personally think that has something to do with it. Now there’s a group that agrees with that and there’s a group that doesn’t agree with that.”

They go in and they get this monster shot. I mean, have you ever seen the size of it? It’s like they’re pumping in–you know, it’s terrible, the amount. And they pump this in to this little body, and then all of a sudden the child is different a month later, and I strongly believe that’s it. They should have vaccinations, but do them separately and over an extended period of time, not all at one time.

Then, of course, he’s been seen on Twitter many times posting pure antivaccine pseudoscience, as I documented last year:

Massive combined inoculations to small children is the cause for big increase in autism….

No wonder antivaccine loons love Donald Trump. It’s not my intention to rehash all the times that Donald Trump has spewed antivaccine idiocy hither, thither, and yon. There are simply too many examples over too long a period of time. Indeed, given how many times Donald Trump has changed positions on so many other issues, I can’t help but point out one last time that antivaccine pseudoscience is probably the one position that he’s been utterly consistent about for at least a decade.

Which brings me back to Andrew Wakefield’s claim. Did Donald Trump really meet with Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced UK surgeon and researcher who was struck off and whose research leading to his infamous 1998 case series in The Lancet implicating MMR as a risk factor for autism was shown to be fraudulent so brilliantly by Brian Deer. If, so, this would be a very disturbing development, far more disturbing than yet another insinuation about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, as it would involve a major party candidate for President of the United States meeting with an antivaccine activist looking to bring measles back to the world. Indeed, I’m glad news of this meeting came out before the election, because, quite frankly, I find the idea of Donald Trump’s having met with an group of antivaccine conspiracy theorists and telling them he would help them if elected far more disturbing than yet another rehashed “revelation” about Clinton e-mails. Indeed, I’m surprised that news of this hasn’t been proclaimed to the antivaccine faithful before.

Our old friend, Levi Quackenboss, one of the quackiest antivaccine bloggers out there, reports that it is indeed true that Wakefield met with Trump and offers to “share” a few things about the meeting. Why did she wait until November 1, when Wakefield’s talk dates to late August and his alleged meeting with Donald Trump a couple of days before his talk? Who knows? Who cares? I’m bringing this up because it’s something that needs to be known before the election, and Quackenboss has reported on previous meetings between the antivaccine activists behind the movie VAXXED, such as Del Bigtree, and other legislators, such as Rep. Jason Chaffetz, before. Just last week, the VAXXED crew was in my state meeting with state legislators.

The team that visited Trump last summer says that he is very consistent in his position on vaccines. He has certainly not abandoned us. They specifically talked with him about vaccine-induced autism and they report that Trump undoubtedly knows that vaccines can and do cause autism.

Trump asked the type of questions that show the depth of his knowledge of the subject, such as how the current schedule came into being and how he can change it. He is already up to speed on what is happening. He already understands the issue.

At this point, I can’t help but note that, if Trump is truly “up to speed” on issues of vaccines and autism, even if it’s to be “up to speed” enough to know what antivaccine quacks are claiming, it would be the first time he’s been up-to-speed on pretty much any policy issue. If there’s one thing that’s been consistent about Donald Trump, it’s been that he assiduously avoids anything resembling the painful nasty details of science and policy and goes with conspiracy theories. Of course, that’s why he is so dangerous and why it is so disturbing that he actually met with the VAXXED team. Remember, the movie VAXXED is basically a movie about a conspiracy theory, that of the “CDC whistleblower.” As I mentioned a couple of days ago, VAXXED, which was directed by Wakefield and produced by Del Bigtree, is a propaganda movie disguised as a documentary that is so blatant, so full of misinformation and lies, that, if she were alive today to see it, Leni Riefenstahl would say, “Dudes, that’s a bit much. You might want to tone it down a bit.” (Yes, I like to imagine Riefenstahl calling Bigtree and Wakefield “dudes,” with a thick German accent.)

The most important promise came at the end of their meeting when someone said, “Donald, you are the only one who can fix this.”

And Trump said, “I will.”

He will fix this.

Fixing this is not rocket science. Hell, it’s not even vaccine science. He will fix this. It is entirely fixable, and he appreciates our advocates lending their assistance in getting it done.

Friends, we have a direct route to stopping this madness. Can you imagine that for a second? Can you just imagine having vaccine education advocates getting face-time with the person who appoints the director of the CDC?

Trump asked for a follow-up with our side. They are giving him advice on how to help us.

It’s quite possible that Quackenboss is delusional about how much sway antivaccinationists have with the Trump campaign. She’s frequently delusional about a great many things. On the other hand, politicians—and, make no mistake, Trump is now a politician—frequently tell constituents what they want to hear. Also, Trump is known for being a most talented and shameless liar. However, there is a grain of plausibility here. Trump loves conspiracy theories, and the CDC whistleblower is a doozy of a conspiracy theory. He believes Alex Jones. He Tweets conspiracy theories unaltered about a great many things. He lies. All the time. So who knows what Trump really thought meeting with Andrew Wakefield and the VAXXED crew (and whoever else came along for the ride)? If he actually watched the copy of VAXXED Quackenboss claims that he received from Wakefield, Trump would almost certainly eat it up.

So did Donald Trump meet with Andrew Wakefield? Wakefield is a liar, and Quackenboss is deluded, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t telling the truth here. They might be exaggerating or spinning or they might be deluding themselves into believing that Trump cares about their pet conspiracy theories more than he actually does, but it does appear that Trump did meet with a man who is arguably the most famous antivaccine activist in the world.

Of course, Trump has no clue about how the government works. He’s frequently blamed Hillary Clinton for not getting things done in 25 years in the federal government, seemingly not understanding that, for example, a single junior Senator can’t change the law by fiat, and even the President’s power to achieve his or her aims is constrained by Congress and the Courts. If Trump were elected and actually did follow through with the promises that Quackenboss claims he made to Wakefield, what he could achieve would be limited. He couldn’t, for example, unilaterally change the laws in 50 states mandating certain vaccinations for children entering school and daycare. He could, however, royally screw up the CDC, reversing decades of progress, by meddling in the internal affairs of the CDC and appointing a Secretary of Health and Human Services who is antivaccine-sympathetic. True, given existing law and the permanent bureaucracy of HHS and the CDC, there are limits to what he could do without changing the law, but by promoting the myth that vaccines cause autism from the White House as President of the United States, even if he ultimately produces little substantive difference in actual vaccine policy, he can still do enormous damage to public health that would take decades to reverse. Millions would believe the myth coming from the President of the United States.

That scares me almost as much as the thought of Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear trigger.

264 Comments

To a considerable extent, I really don’t care what USAian’s do to themselves in their own country but both presidential candidates are very scary from a foreign policy view.

The suggestion that Trump could help turn the USA into a net exporter of VPD’s and possibly gut one of the premier public health organizations in the world adds to the nightmare. And given Trump’s flair for policy the idiot would never understand the issue!

My condolences on your lack of a good option. A raving lunatic, or an incompetent twit. One doesn’t understand the rules, and the other doesn’t care to follow them. You folks really need to develop a third and fourth party that is actually viable at the national level. Then at least you would have an option beyond holding your nose and voting for the least bad.

A racist, facist sexual predator with an undiagnosed personality disorder, impulse control issues, and a love of conspiracy theories who denies basic science about numerous issues, wants to increase the number of countries who have nukes, and has been endorsed by the KKK and neo-Nazi groups (I don’t get how “ludgenpresse” and “judenpresse” being all over his rallies isn’t getting more attention) and wants to gut the first amendment and jail his opponent, whose VP pick’s dream is to usher the US into the Republic of Gilead.

vs.

A pretty competent politician whose policies you may disagree with but EMAILS and VINCE FOSTER and probably more than a little bit her vagina and her shrill voice.

A shady politician vs. a literal dumpster fire who could end the world.

#4 Frequent Lurker
No false equivalences from me. I think Clinton is a danger on the foreign affairs and that her foreign affairs / are pretty incompetent as the history of the last 15 or 20 years indicates. Thus she/they scare me.

Oh, and the Benghazi fiasco was nothing but the GOP being their normal idiot selves. One hopes that no one discovers that Clinton got a speeding ticket when she was in college. Trump/GOP would turn that into a hit and run with Hillary shooting it out with the FBI as she made her escape.

I really don’t care that much about US internal policy where she may be quite competent though I probably would not like some of her policies.

OTOH Trump is everything you say and probably a lot more. He is truly TERRIFYING.

What has amazed me is that the Dems have not tried to make more out of his alleged attempt to do business with Cuba. If at all true, it seems a lot better attack point than those silly Putin accusations. Wait, I forgot that fantasy has replaced fact in this US presidential election

@jkrideau, Clinton was a junior senator, later, US Secretary of State.
Junior senators don’t set policy for anything, save perhaps, their own office.
The US Secretary of State doesn’t set policy, the POTUS does.

As for Trump attempting to conduct any business with Cuba, that’s a dead issue since Obama opened relations with Cuba.
But, Trump openly admiring Putin and Putin’s support for Trump (plus a few other things I cannot discuss) does give me grave reservations about the man and his loyalties.

So, we have two choices, Clinton and pretty much no change in policies or Trump and probable embargoes against the US, sanctions against the US and even money, thermonuclear war.

Which would explain why Wakefield and Trump have a natural affinity for each other. One is a former medical researcher who was “struck off” (as they say in the UK) for research misconduct including fabrication of data and failure to disclose a personal financial interest in the research. The other is a serial deadbeat who routinely stiffs his contractors [1] (including lawyers who have defended him in suits against him for failure to pay) and whose repayment practices are so infamous that no US bank will do business with him. Grifters gotta grift.

[1]Why this has not received more prominence I have no idea. Trump is not anti-establishment, he is the establishment, and on many documented occasions he has stiffed the little guy. In spite of this, lots of small business owners plan to vote for Trump, which is like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders.

Never before have I heard so many comparing the candidate of their party to some alleged “perfect” candidate, as if in the past this was the case and only now are we faced with such horrible “imperfection”. Appeals to therefore vote for loons on the fringe are even more confounding.

# 9As for Trump attempting to conduct any business with Cuba, that’s a dead issue since Obama opened relations with Cuba.

I guess it is but I don’t see why. It seems to me to be pretty damn close to dealing with the enemy. I mean the next best thing to committing treason and it’s being ignored?
It seems a bit like telling Lord HaHa the war is over so don’t worry about your broadcasts.

Putin’s support for Trump ????
He may have said something kind about Trump but support? He’s not stupid. My personal bet is that Putin and his cabinet are sitting around the cabinet table (or the banya?) shaking their heads and hoping for Hillary as the lesser of the two evils.

we have two choices
Yes, the not great but not mad one of Clinton and the totally mad and bad one of Trump.

You may call us names like “paranoid conspiracy nuts”, but at least have one thing in common: Our experiences and knowledge of the subject is consistent. In contrast, pro-vaxxer fanatics seem to be all over the map with their beliefs and basic knowledge. I’ve been having this debate for a long time, and in that time I’ve heard a broad array of arguments:

Pro-vaxxer fanatic #1 claims that vaccines are not drugs.
Pro-vaxxer fanatic #2 admit that some vaccines carry more risks than others (which I agree with).
Pro-vaxxer fanatic #3 lumps 3rd world countries into the disease fatality statistics.
Pro-vaxxer fanatic #4 claims that absolutely NO Thiomersal
exists in ANY vaccines.
Pro-vaxxer fanatic #5 claims that any/all children can take an unlimited amount of vaccines and suffer 0 serious adverse reactions.
Pro-vaxxer fanatic #6 (my personal favorite) concedes that vaccines can cause serious/permanent damage to a portion of the population but blames it on “bad genes”.

So you see, its very hard for anyone who thinks critically to take any of you guys seriously. It would be great however if pro-vaxxers could hold a town meeting to get on the same page with their beliefs.

Yes, this is so unfair! Nobody care about them 3d world people, nothing antivaxers say could possibly affect views of the people living there, and besides, just feed all of those savages lots of vitamin A, cod liver oil and apple cider vinegar and they won’t have any more of disgusting yet beneficial diseases that we eradicated through better sanitation.

He may have said something kind about Trump but support? He’s not stupid. My personal bet is that Putin and his cabinet are sitting around the cabinet table (or the banya?) shaking their heads and hoping for Hillary as the lesser of the two evils.

I strongly disagree. There is substantial evidence that Russian hackers, who may have Russian government support, have been working in concert with Wikileaks in order to influence the election in Donald Trump’s favor. Remember also that Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, resigned after his lobbying ties to Russia became news. And the Republican party platform planks that Trump was personally interested in were all foreign policy planks that were changed in a more pro-Russia direction.

I have also heard suggestions that Putin’s agents may have compromised Trump himself–suggestions I find plausible because Donald Trump is the kind of man who is easily lured into a “honey trap”. I don’t think Trump is an actual Russian agent, but the most charitable reading of his Russia ties that I can come up with is that Putin considers him a useful idiot.

Putin’s goal is to weaken Western alliances, including NATO and the EU. There was Russian money on the pro-Brexit side in that referendum, and Putin appears to be backing Le Pen in France. Electing Donald Trump would further Putin’s goals, at least in the short to medium term.

Eric Lund”
“the most charitable reading of his Russia ties that I can come up with is that Putin considers him a useful idiot”

That’s how I read it too. And what many observers noticed: Trump had financial ties with Russia, he admires Putin as a “strong leader”, and Putin, not being stupid indeed, is exploiting the situation to the max. I bet he would love a president Trump going into nuclear war with China or North Korea, for instance…

Three thoughts –
A. The comments you quoted from Trump about needle size really suggest he has not seen a child vaccinated in a long time, maybe ever. Wonder where that weird idea got fixed in his head.

B. Someone who asks how the current schedule came about is not, in my view, demonstrating depth of knowledge, and the fact that it’s presented that way is, well, weird.

C. The blogger may also have some strange conceptions about how our policy making system and the CDC work. Yes, if Trump is elected, he can nominate a director for the CDC that will then have to be confirmed by the Senate. That does not translate into being able to magically order the CDC around or change our vaccine schedule, or affect state policies on this. Even if we believed for a moment that a hypothetical President Trump would focus all his energies on that, and not on pleasing his other, more numerous supporters. If the blogger thinks that Trump being elected would directly translate into our vaccine scheduled being undermined, the blogger doesn’t understand the administrative state any better than she understands vaccines.

If the blogger thinks that Trump being elected would directly translate into our vaccine scheduled being undermined, the blogger doesn’t understand the administrative state any better than she understands vaccines.

But, but … Robyn Ross is a lawyer!

My money’s on this being an utter crock, but I suppose somebody could just ask Trump.

The comments you quoted from Trump about needle size really suggest he has not seen a child vaccinated in a long time, maybe ever. Wonder where that weird idea got fixed in his head.

Trump is 70 years old now, so he would have been about nine when the Salk vaccine became available. I don’t know for sure if he got a polio vaccination, but polio was a big deal in the early to mid 1950s, so it’s probable he did. It is also possible that, between improved technology and not being fully physically grown when he got the vaccine, he might think that the needle is bigger than it really is.

I am sure, however, that you are right about his not seeing a child vaccinated recently. That would have been something his children’s mothers would have dealt with.

but by promoting the myth that vaccines cause autism from the White House as President of the United States … he can still do enormous damage to public health that would take decades to reverse

Yes, but he would garner considerable ridicule from the rest of the world, which might help a few people realise just what sort of person they’d voted into the White House. Then again, such criticism would be seen by some of his other fans as evidence which bolsters their paranoid conspiracy fantasies. Oh well.

Sorry. If Trump gets in, you’re fucked. But if that happens, I’ll say thanks for joining us: I thought only the UK had been so monumentally stupid as to vote to fuck itself up this year.

which might help a few people realise just what sort of person they’d voted into the White House

Unfortunately, the people who would vote for Trump won’t be among them. They seem absolutely sure that Trump should be President. The Dunning-Kruger is strong in Trump voters, as it is in Trump himself.

while I have no idea if the fellow himself is amongst them
( he protests otherwise- possibly truthfully as his daughter is Jewish )
some of his supporters are quite anti-Semitic and anti-media, often conflating the two.

I read and heard about quite a few instances of awful material on social media flung on people who may be Jewish or who have ‘Jewish-sounding’ names

Anyway, re: Putin and Trump, Trump claims that Putin “says nice things” about him. It’s been reported that Putin called Trump “bright” or “brilliant” – this is kind of true, in the literal sense. He called him yarkii, which literally means bright or brilliant, in the “colorful” or even “gaudy” sense.

Putin is a lot of things, but not stupid, as mentioned above. He certainly does favor a President Trump, though – he has come right out and said it now – because Trump would be just as much of a xenophobe/Islamophobe/racist/etc. as Putin. Plus he would be a useful idiot; he’s a gargoyle downspout for pipeline* of Russian disinformation. See him repeating BS from RT lately.

Yeah, but that “all things will pass” and “all things will pass away” applies to ME, too, and I don’t want to pass away having spent the next few decades left in my life experiencing the aftereffects of a Trump Presidency.

[email protected]: Granted, Trump’s supporters won’t care. But as Willie Stark put it, “the right kind of argumentum can scare the hominem into a laundry bill he didn’t expect.” So I can envision a Russian agent telling Trump something like this:

We have film of what you did last night. That girl is underage. We know that the American police will prosecute people who do this. You wouldn’t want us to share this film with the American Embassy, would you?

Trump has gotten away with as much as he has because as a white male with money, he automatically gets a lot of not-entirely-deserved respect. That, and the non-disclosure agreements he makes everybody working with him sign. (We know about how he treated Alicia Machado because, as the reigning Miss Universe when Trump bought the pageant, she was not covered under that NDA.) But the police properly take a dim view of an adult who has sex with minors.

[email protected]: For a polling aggregator, I prefer Sam Wang’s site. 538 has been much too sensitive to news noise this cycle, and I think their error bars are much too large.

Wang shows Clinton as having a 97% (random drift) to 99% (Bayesian) chance of winning, and computes that the state level polls would have to shift in aggregate three points toward Trump for Trump to win. The Senate, however, looks like it’s coming down to the wire. The Democrats need to pick up four seats (five if the Republicans win the Presidency) to gain a Senate majority. Illinois is almost assured, and Pennsylvania is likely. But five other Republican-held seats (IN, MO, NC, NH, WI) and one Democratic-held seat (Nevada) are within one percent. So if you are looking for a place for a political donation, consider donating in one of those six races.

Taking the House is a longshot, because districts in several states are so heavily gerrymandered that Clinton would have to win by about 8 points to make a House flip likely. But the Democrats are likely to pick up some seats–15 to 20 is the estimated range I have seen; 30 would be required to flip the house. I live in one of the potential pick-up districts (NH-01). Long-time readers of this blog will be pleased to hear that Issa (CA-49) is one of the endangered incumbents.

It is quite possible that the Russians have hacked the Democrats system. But then, so, probably, has the NSA, GCHQ (?), the Chinese, and a spotty teenager in his parents’ basement in Cleveland Ohio. The CSE in Ottawa may have done it if they had a quiet Friday. Hacking a system with that many users including volunteers is likely to be trivial.

An adjective like that tends to support my opinion that Putin is not supporting Trump. Trump could play the role of useful idiot, though rising up to the level is “useful” might be difficult for him.

He would be likely to be such a loose cannon that he would be of a dangerous liability than any kind of asset. I am sure Putin knows that Trump would be just as dishonest, shifty and opportunistic dealing with him as he would be when dealing with anyone else.Putin is a smart politician and seems unlikely to do something this stupid and chancy.

Putin is juggling a number serious situations around home, does anyone think he is going to waste time and annoy the most likely new presidentof the US by supporting a losing buffoon?

One can see one reason why he might want it to appear that he supports Trump; he really prefers Clinton as the devil he knows versus the mad idiot no one knows. Anyone remember the Brer Rabbit stories?

Putin appears to support Trump; Americans panic and rush to Clinton. Occam’s razor suggests it is a lot simpler to blame the rumours on some Democratic Party disinformation effort.

Still it is quite possible that the Russians have hacked the Democrats computers. But then, so probably has the NSA, Bletchly Park, the Chinese, the Romanians and a spotty teenager in this parents’ basement in Cleveland Ohio. The CSE in Ottawa may have done it if it was a quiet Friday.

Hacking a system with that many users including volunteers and technologically untrained politicians is likely to be trivial.

I did not bookmark it but I remember a report that one “Russian” hacker left behind some kind of user name. The name was “Фе́ликс Эдму́ндович” [Felix Edmundovich] the name and patronymic of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Let’s make sure everyone realizes it is the FSB! This is the equivalent of a 3 year old hiding behind the sofa and then jumping up and down saying, “Here I am Daddy”. Sorry but this type of thing makes me less convinced about any Russian activity.

I pick Andy as lying, all the way. The “mandatory vaccination nationwide” if HRC is elected claim is the giveaway. Andy has to know pols in Texas who would explain that the GOP will almost certainly retain the House, which will consider no business other than impeaching Clinton and repealing Obamacare. NONE of HRC’s agenda will get past the House or the Senate filibuster, and whatever HRC devotes her limited political capital to in an attempt to move forward, it won’t be vaccines.

Even if AJW has started to half-believe his own BS and Sennet’s as well, his broader CT-mongering is pure con. The whole ‘new-Tuskeegee’ schtick is one of the most transparently cynical and calculated bits of BS I’ve ever seen.

If The Donald did actually meet with anyone from Team Vaxxed’, I doubt he’d remember their names, and with his infamously short attention span I put the odds he watched the movie at zero. Maybe, if Del sent him a brown-nosing Tweet, Trump would read it and re-tweet it along with other praise from neo-nazis, anti-semites, and pickup-artist MRAs.

Andy’s just another comparatively low-level grifter toward the back of the long line of opportunists looking to make a buck by exploiting Trumpism, and actually LESS “ridiculously over-the-top” than the major players in front of him in line. On Monday, Ann Coulter said if Trump loses politics is over, and the only recourse is to hunker in a bunker as “America becomes some combo platter of Afghanistan and Guatemala.”

Andy’s grift is to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle by sucking money from narcissistic well-heeled strivers who have had their visions of the perfect life they feel was their destiny and birthright derailed by the ‘blight’ of autism. He cares not one whit if the common folk who were once worried enough to hold off on immunizing their kids are now taking them in for their shots, as long as enough of the hoi poloi with ASD kids can be convinced only he can oppose the massive conspiracy that just MUST have been necessary to ‘blight’ their otherwise ubermenschen ‘winning’ existences. He needs to keep less than a few thousand marks from pulling out the IV cash-transfusion needle of his con. And spinning a narrative where HRC would signal The End of Days, but he and only he, ANDY WAKEFIELD has the ear of The Donald and can save the perfect snowflake babies wil get them to open their wallets one more time.

I’m sure Andy has already worked out another narrative variation to fuel his grift after Trump goes down in flames, and in true Orwellina fashion, if anything he’s ever said in the past needs to be erased and forgotten to accomodate it, that will occur with no perceivable friction.

As frightening as Trumpism truly is, this latest blast from Andy is actually good news on the public health front. The AVs keep moving farther out the looney-limb, and though this parallels Trumpism, it’s haute bourgeois narcissism won’t draw any converts from the lumpen-Trumpen. VPD outbreaks can’t happen unless a certain critical mass of more-or-less otherwise normal parents become just worried enough about vaccine ‘maybes’ that they fail to act – people who do not hold ‘vaccines absolutely cause autism’ as a first principle that dominates and redefines their identities. They have a lot of high-stakes things to worry about in the Trump/Clinton contest : losing or finding a decent paying job, they or theirs dying in a war or terrorist attack, losing everything in the next crash of the speculation bubble, sexual harassment… Telling anyone but the already True Believers that this is “a one-issue” election, and is a sure way to get them to turn away and never take anything else you say or have ever said seriously.

In closing, I submit it’s waaay past time to retire ‘stupid’ as an epithet directed at either Andy or his marks. What’s going on there is a very clever con artist exploiting a precise pathological cognitive blindspot shared by a small group of not-in-any-general-way-stupid swells. There’s simply no rational way to explain the so-far-BEYOND-stupid BS they’re willing to buy, and he can get away with selling them.

Trump is not anti-establishment, he is the establishment, and on many documented occasions he has stiffed the little guy. In spite of this, lots of small business owners plan to vote for Trump, which is like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders.

That is absolutely brilliant. Mind if I stash that in my quotefile for future reuse? 😉

I’m just depressed that in an election with 4 candidates (counting the third party folks), one is full on anti-vaxx (Trump) one is very loud dog whistles anti-vax (Stein), one is probably anti-vax but I haven’t heard it directly (Johnson) and only one actually acknowledges the science behind vaccination (Clinton).

3rd world (old term, by the way. Not considered very respectful) countries like…oh, France (where measles infection directly kills 1 in 2000) or California (where SSPE is killing people who catch measles early on).

Gary Johnson changed his opinion from 4 years ago and now supports vaccination. Unfortunately for his campaign hopes, he didn’t do his foreign affairs homework and has tanked in the polls. But we might see a complete independent win in Utah.

Until recently Johnson opposed ‘mandatory vaccination’ on Libertarian principle, but in August someone explained herd immunity to him and he changed his position:

ohnson said he believes vaccination policy should be handled at the local level. “In my opinion, this is a local issue. If it ends up to be a federal issue, I would come down on the side of science and I would probably require that vaccine,” he said. Johnson said his position changed recently. “It’s an evolution actually just in the last month or so,” he said. “I was under the belief that … ‘Why require a vaccine? If I don’t want my child to have a vaccine and you want yours to, let yours have the vaccine and they’ll be immune.’ Well, it turns out that that’s not the case, and it may sound terribly uninformed on my part, but I didn’t realize that.”

Longtime RI readers will recall Orac faulted Clinton back in ’08 for her responses to a questionnaire on autism research from an autism activist group: http://tinyurl.com/zr2ugwu. At the time, anti-vax had yet to retreat to the Trump-loving lunatic fringe represented by AoA, NVIC had some bi-partisan credibility, especially given it’s funding by Claire Dwoskin, whose hubby Al was a friend and political ally of the Clintons.. and a big donor to HRC’s campaign. So, Hillary was probably just doing a bit of temporary pandering to Claire Dwoskin for the $$, and not paying that much attention to the science. Post-Disneyland, that whole dynamic disappeared, HRC made her celebrated #GrandmothersKnowBest Tweet: “The earth is round, the sky is blue, and #vaccineswork. Let’s protect all our kids.” The remaining True Believer AV’s have subsequently been running “Mandated Vaccines Will Be A Toxic Reality Of A Clinton Administration” smack anywhere they can catch a vine. A Google search of ‘Claire Dwoskin vaccines’ yields ZERO hits posted in the past 12 months.

I went to an issues-matching website where one of the questions dealt with Vaccines. It said that Trump supports Federally mandated vaccines for children, and the quote they had to support that “opinion” was woefully brief and vague (“I’m for vaccines… but would spread them out”). Their fact checker must not have any idea what he/she was looking for, but being misled like that makes me cringe. I had to explain to my husband the “I’m not antivaccine, but….” anti-vax statement.

[email protected]: The “chickens for Colonel Sanders” part is not original with me–I’ve long since forgotten who I first heard use it. But if you think the line will persuade any potential voters, go ahead and use it.

There was a recent post to the VAXXED Facebook page congratulating Wakefraud for being in Italy speaking to “leaders” there about Vaxxed. The picture with the post was Wakefield with the US flag taking up the whole background. I saw some debate over whether Wakfraud now has US citizenship. If not, then the Trumpers need to know that AJW is one of them thar ebil foreigners.

Going by the numbers- and a little bit of insider dope**- I think that we don’t have that much to fear:
– look at the numbers ( including Wang and Moody’s – which I have seen as well as those on my other sites)
– liberals/ democrats are notorious ‘bedwetters’ prior to elections – even the last one ( numbers looked good for the Handsome Black Ninj.. I mean Mr Obama but the partisans freaked out bigly).** It is in their nature.

At any rate, I keep telling myself these things so I don’t go out and drown my sorrows in Tanqueray and diet tonic.

** David Plouffe etc.
*** I know I had to say it once. It IS BIG LEAGUE.

Also, Trump may not have been followed as closely by journalists as he should have been ( despite the great stuff I see now although I did see some way back when):
there is so much dreck surrounding him, they seem to have let some pass as they move on to the next piece of crap, hoping desperately to find more brightly shining crap to write about/ report on. AND there are loads of it.

Opposition research on him prior to his convention may have not been so great- did they hope to save money, doubting that he would last?

I take comfort in the fact that women do NOT want to vote for him by a wide margin,
so being that most – if not all- states have more women than men and women vote more than men,
even if 50% of women vote against him, we can’t win.

sadmar and squirrelelite, Thanks! “On the state level” makes me super twitchy, but it’s really refreshing to hear that not only is Johnson willing to not blindly follow the party line on this, but that’s he’s open to new information.
(Not that I would vote for him. If anything this election cycle has shown him to be pretty darn loony in general. And I already voted, happily, for HRC.)

@JP: Nate said that when the Cubs were down 3 games to 1. The fact that the Cubs came back to win the next 3 games is a reminder that unlikely things like that can in fact happen, but it doesn’t make other unlikely things more likely to happen. So if you were discounting Trump as having no chance when Hillary was being given a 87% chance of winning, you should be more worried than that, but not so worried that you think the sky is falling.

I don’t know what you’re all so upset about. I mean, he seems like a reasonable sort. Who among us has not looked at a 10 year old girl and said, “I’ll be dating her in 10 years, can you believe it?” It takes a truly decent, honourable man to sexualize a child. And his “love” for his eldest daughter is not puke-inducing in the least. His comments with respect to her are only cringeworthy if you’re one of these pantsuit-loving feminazis.

Big news around this household: Youngest was accepted into an accelerated nursing program (BSN in 18 months – you have to already have a BA to be admitted). She’s already discussing what vaccines she needs to get to make sure she’s fully UTD, especially for a hospital setting. (She’s normal UTD, but needs a few boosters for clinicals).

We have to go with the flow and keep looking at the numbers. As I mentioned above, liberals are well-known for their capacity for freaking out: after all, we are sensitive souls ( not that we have souls) and metaphorically, bedwetters ( see the other sites I enumerate above).

Right now. although I am decidedly not as pleased as punch, I feel that we are not in a terrible place. Probabilities of more than 80% in an ideologically divided country would never become ironbound realities but are merely evanescent reactions to Trumpian faux pas/ reveals.

Portions of these blocs may indeed make up for other weaknesses compared to Obama (such as the lessened Youngster factor and decreased turnout amongst African Americans). She may win some voters whom traditional Republicans used to count upon ( white college educated). It seems that the Hispanic vote may be very important this year and they don’t love him.

AND don’t forget the news cycle. Although it gives and it takes away**, more and more crap is leaking about Trump and his friends in the FBI etc

“I am reminded of the quote attributed to 19th-Century Mexican President Porfirio Diaz: “Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States!”

A curious remark, seeing that Diaz got U.S. support for his 8th run for the Presidency (which he won thanks to massive electoral fraud, and was subsequently driven from office). Diaz seems to have prospered during his time as Mexico’s ruler despite being so close to the United States:

“The Porfiriato was marked by corruption and bloodshed of unprecedented scale in Mexican history. Economic growth mainly benefited Díaz’ close allies such as small political groups, family and accomplices government posts such as heads of army units, Mexican states as well as foreigners such as the Rockefellers, Hearsts and Guggenheims of the time. Díaz in turn would require a percentage of their tax earnings, amassing a large personal fortune.”

Also, Trump may not have been followed as closely by journalists as he should have been ( despite the great stuff I see now although I did see some way back when):
there is so much dreck surrounding him, they seem to have let some pass as they move on to the next piece of crap, hoping desperately to find more brightly shining crap to write about/ report on. AND there are loads of it.

A couple of points here. One, a lot of Trump’s scandalous behavior involves sex, one way or another. Sex sells. There is a reason why so many beer ads feature babes in bikinis. It’s one of the things that titillated so much of the American public during Bill Clinton’s presidency (especially the hypocrisy of “family values” Congressmen arguing for Clinton’s impeachment over a consensual extramarital affair while themselves being engaged in extramarital affairs). Trump’s history (cheating with eventual wife #2 while married to wife #1, and subsequently cheating with eventual wife #3 while married to wife #2) was at least partially known.

Furthermore, Trump is a New Yorker, and a large fraction of the national press in the US is based in New York. This obviously includes the New York Times, but also the Big Three networks, Fox News, and MSNBC. (I’m not sure if CNN runs out of Atlanta or New York.) These people know Trump better than most Americans know Trump, and most New Yorkers in those circles hate Trump.

Eric Lund @78: There’s also the issue that Trump regularly encourages the people at his rallies to rage at specific members of the media covering his campaign. At least one reported for NBC has to have Secret Service protection to get in and out of those events safely.

Dr. Verstraeten [CDC], pg. 40: “…we have found statistically significant relationships between the exposure and outcomes for these different exposures and outcomes. First, for two months of age, an unspecified developmental delay, which has its own specific ICD9 code. Exposure at three months of age, Tics. Exposure at six months of age, an attention deficit disorder. Exposure at one, three and six months of age, language and speech delays which are two separate ICD9 codes. Exposures at one, three and six months of age, the entire category of neurodevelopmental delays, which includes all of these plus a number of other disorders

Dr. Verstraeten [CDC], pg. 44: “Now for speech delays, which is the largest single disorder in this category of neurologic delays. The results are a suggestion of a trend with a small dip. The overall test for trend is highly statistically significant above one.”

Dr. Verstraeten [CDC], pg. 76: “What I have done here, I am putting into the model instead of mercury, a number of antigens that the children received, and what do we get? Not surprisingly, we get very similar estimates as what we got for Thimerosal because every vaccine put in the equation has Thimerosal. So for speech and the other ones maybe it’s not so significant, but for the overall group it is also significant….Here we have the same thing, but instead of number of antigens, number of shots. Just the number of vaccinations given to a child, which is also for nearly all of them significantly related.”

Dr. Guess, pg. 77: “So this essentially is a 7% risk per antigen, an antigen is like in DPT you’ve got three antigens.”

Dr. Verstraeten [CDC], pg. 77: “Correct.”

Dr. Egan, pg. 77: “Could you do this calculation for aluminum?”

Dr. Verstraeten [CDC], pg. 77: “I did it for aluminum…Actually the results were almost identical to ethylmercury because the amount of aluminum goes along almost exactly with the mercury one.”

My main concern is that people tell polls one thing, then go do another.

Of course this is just speculation until the votes are counted, but this is more likely to work in Clinton’s favor than Trump’s. My suspicion is that many women whose husbands/boyfriends are Trump supporters may be reluctant to say out loud, where their husbands/boyfriends can hear, that they plan to vote for Clinton. They may fear (and in many cases this fear is reasonable) retribution for voicing such opinions. Not all Trump supporters are violent types, but enough are that there are likely to be households where this dynamic is going on.

What I’m rather pleased about is that ( FINALLY!) his business operations, tax issues, university/ foundation shenanigans, *interesting* supporters, vendetti/ vendettas and other acts of interpersonal warfare are being exposed over the liberal airwaves, press and on the net. His tweets provide readers with insight into how his mind works. I just hope it’s enough to stop the red tide.

At ant rate, I’m been watching your state anxiously: what do you think?

During the primaries, he talked about carrying NY- which I found hilarious. Yeah, they hate him.

Interestingly, because I’ve observed alt media for years, I’m familiar with the cult of anti-professionalism and anti-institutionalism common on alt med sites. It was refreshing to hear IIRC David Frumm discuss the same ideas from his own perspective on Maher’s show yesterday.
Wow! I agree with him on something!

Outsider cults despise the mainstream media because it has the cacpacity to shatter their cherished mythology with data and facts and then circulate that information quickly and efficiently.
– If you were a woo-meister selling a cancer cure or
– if you had a end times scenario or
– if you had a FEMA camps story or
– new insider material from the FBI-
I doubt that you would appreciate the work of reporters digging into your field of dreams and exposing the tall tales you are currently harvesting.

Thus, the Orange One as well as woo-meisters hate the media and would shut it down if they could.
It’s happened before you know.

I just scared myself there.

As an aside:
Mikey has cranked up the crazy to eleven teen ( Natural News)

As moon landing hoax debunker S. G. Collins has observed, there really are conspiracies, just not the ones you think…

And we now appear to have a conspiracy to ‘rig’ a presidential election – well, interfere in it anyway – AGAINST Hillary Clinton and in favor of Donald Trump.

It’s starts with hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, the major $$ source for alt.right website Breitbart.Com hater of all things Hillary, and now the major supplier of bankroll for the Trump campaign (Donald never spends his own money). ALL of the Trump campaign’s honchos – Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, and long-time full-time anti-Clinton CT propagandist David Bossie – are former employees of Mercer-backed groups. Last year, Breitbart writer Peter Schweizer published a dubious hit-book on the Clinton Foundation and HRC as Secy of State, titled Clinton Cash and Schwiezer produced and distributed a documentary film version.

Long before he entered the Trump camp, Rudy Giuliani was in the hate-hate-hate-HRC camp (she defeated him for the Senate). One of Giuliani’s old buddies is NY conservative LEO circles a guy named James Kallstrom, a former Assistant Director of the FBI who headed the NYC office of the Bureau. Remember when reporters uncovered that Trump’s promised $1 million donation to veterans groups after he skipped one of the primary debates hadn’t been paid, and Trump was forced to cut a check in short order? The $1 mil went entirely to a nonprofit run by Kallstrom, a deal likely brokered by Giuliani. Kallstrom subsequently endorsed Trump.

Two days before FBI director James Comey rocked the world last week, Rudy Giuliani was on Fox, where he volunteered, un-prodded by any question: “I think he’s [Donald Trump] got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.” Pressed for specifics, he said: “We’ve got a couple of things up our sleeve that should turn this thing around.”[Daily Beast]

The day Comey’s letter appeared, Rudy stated:

“The other rumor that I get is that there’s a kind of revolution going on inside the FBI about the original conclusion [not to charge Clinton] being completely unjustified and almost a slap in the face to the FBI’s integrity. I know that from former agents.

Last week, Kallstom appeared on an NYC radio talk show, saying, ““The Clintons, that’s a crime family, basically, It’s like organized crime. I mean the Clinton Foundation is a cesspool.” he also called HRC a pathological liar. This story was given major play on Breitbart. Various media outlets also reported rumors last week that the NYC FBI office wasn’t just investigating the emails found on Anthony Weiner’s computer, but that agents there had been pushing for a larger investigation of The Clinton Foundation, and were frustrated when their superiors in the Justice Department nixed the request. Then it was reported that the ‘evidence’ that fueled these agents’ concerns was Clinton Cash.

Presumably, some of those agents seeking to go after the Clintons worked under Kallstrom, may have been selected/promoted/mentored by him, and remain close to him. Thus, Giulinai’s early knowledge of what was in the Comey letter was probably a leak from an active agent to Kallstrom and then to Rudy, which Giuliani essentially confirmed to Chris Mathews yesterday (wo mentioning Kallstrom by name). IANAL etc., but that alone would seem to be a violation of The Hatch Act by the Kallstrom-crony NYC “FBI cell”.

The more-or-less obvious question is ‘what communication or influence went the the direction, from Giuliani and the Trump campaign, through Kallstrom, to the active FBI agents who wanted to use Clinton Cash as a blueprint for investigating HRC?’ (Do I have to tell you that the allegations in Clinton Cash are essentially a disreputable CT? Can you say. ‘CDC Whistleblower’? I knew that you could.) On the Matthews show, Rudy denied any knowledge or involvement other than receiving a tip from “former agents”. Credible? To use one of The Donald’s stock phrases, “I don’t think so!” Giuliani had said, “We’ve got a couple of things up our sleeve that should turn this thing around.” Then he had issued a smug self-satisifed grin that burst into a cackle.

So basically, what we have here is a damn good possibility/probability that Rudy had Trump funnel $1 mil (of Schweizer’s $$, probably) to Jim Kallstrom, who – his existing antimus thus prodded to action – then lobbied his cronies in the NYC “FBI cell” to use “debunked, Breitbart-funded bullshit from that dumb Clinton Cash book” [Wonkette] to gin up a fresh investigation into HRC. The players would know that regardless of whether Comey scotched it or not, they could leak the details shortly before the election, the ‘Crooked Hillary IS going to jail’ rumors would dominate the news cycle, and any investigative expose into Giuliani and Kallstrom’s machinations wouldn’t get serious play in the MSM until sometime after the votes were in.

If that is the case, the FBI “cell” didn’t just dangle a few toes across the line of The Hatch Act. Noting the Trumpers glee and jokes at the damage done to Clinton, the Wonkette piece ends, “Haha, attempted coups are HILARIOUS.” A Haaretz headline refers to “The Conspiracy Theory About the FBI Putsch Against Clinton and Democracy” apparently mockingly, but the article underneath, while considering the proposition to be unproven conjecture, actually takes it pretty seriously:

If the conspiracy theory is even partially true, it’s nothing less than a sinister effort by rogue agents to undermine the elections process. Comey, in this scenario, isn’t out to sway the elections but is trying to maneuver between the politics outside the Bureau and the rebellious agents inside. If it’s even partially true, it is an unprecedented assault by an actual law enforcement agency against American democracy, which immediately brings to mind the dirty tricks and manipulations conducted against political enemies by the late FBI Director J Edgar Hoover. But even Hoover will seem like small fry if the plot succeeds, and Trump is elected. America, in that case, will never be the same.

BUT WAIT, THERE COULD BE MORE!
Haaretz says the conspiracy scenario reeks of a combination of John Le Carre and Inspector Clouseau. Speaking of Le Carre… No journalist as yet, AFAIK has suggested any of this was coordinated with the Putin/FSB-KGB anti-Clinton/pro-Trump hacking. But, really, at this point, who would be all that surprised?

ERRATUM:
If/when the comment i just posted emerges from moderation, I made two cut and paste errors, substituting ‘Schweizer’ where it should have read “Mercer’ It was Mercer who funded/produced the documentary film version of Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash, and Mercer who is likely the source of of the $1 million dollars Trump ‘donated’ to James Kallstrom’s ‘charity’. Apologies.

It’s not that raspberries cause paralysis or that these two facts prove causation. But it makes me want to keep looking. That small round buckyball sphere is just perfect for conveying more than its share of toxic agricultural chemical per mouthful. If you were to pick an advance warning system that our food might be awash in manmade impurities creating a terrifying new disease, a humble little raspberry might be an ideal contrivance. It has more surface area than Norway has shoreline and it is damnably hard to keep sterile.

@Narad have just been reading the comments in the links you posted, these are some serious damaged people:

“Since that time many experts and dumb people (the same?) have altered the science of mercury so that of all the toxic, mutagenic, teratogenic and carcinogenic properties of mercury compounds, THIMEROSAL almost alone is no more toxic than lemon juice. Will someone tell them you are ENTITLED to your OPINIONS but you can change FACTS.

It is becoming like one of those television intrigue shows ( which I don’t watch) where after a season or two, the writers run out of material and need to start *reaching* to create drama and tension or have to bring in a billionaire family…
BUT this is REAL!

What I heard recently is that the Russians ( around the time the Donald dissed the Khan family) pulled away from him because they thought he was too unstable!

Mikey is now predicting a landslide for the Donald followed by an intervention in the form of a false flag attack by Obama to deny him victory.

My theory about Mikey’s love for Trump and alt right memes is that:
– he’s had a downturn in business ( see Alexa ratings for this past year)
– he’s trying to attract the attention of gullible people who believe Alex Jones et al
– he hopes to please them so that they might purchase his products
– he might actually admire Trump’s business ‘acumen’.

The Other Idiot ( prn.fm) spews similar anti-professionalism/ institutionalism but supports Stein.
I believe he has similar motives – he wants business for his products and films. Electing Trump would result in lower taxes for high earners like these guys.

although I am rather enjoying my secondary career, I find that the political commentary I encounter through that connection is often enough to make my head spin ( not literally, fortunately). It is endless.

As I advised my fellow and sister Oracians recently,
I will again say:
we all need to take a few deep breaths,
sit down in a comfy chair
have a drink or two ( a Negroni is nice)
and say, ” This too shall pass”

In a few days, we’ll have a new president elect and probably a few new scandals and investigations which will give us something to watch on television and talk about;
it will give political wonks and analysts something to do
it will give writers stories to explain
Comedians will be in high heaven.
IT WILL CREATE JOBS**

** my late father always said that when something he hated occurred: “At least, it will create jobs”.

[…] gambit, his promotion of the non-existent connection between vaccination and autism, and the adulation of anti-vaccination cranks bestowed on Trump. Despite all scientific evidence to the contrary, Trump has said he has a […]

[…] gambit, his promotion of the non-existent connection between vaccination and autism, and the adulation of anti-vaccination cranks bestowed on Trump. Despite all scientific evidence to the contrary, Trump has said he has a […]

Current vaccine studies are “tobacco science”. Don’t look at the studies, do your own homework. Talk to ER nurses about kids being brought in after being vaccinated. Talk to the parents of autistic children injured within hours of the vaccine shot – permanent brain damage.

The numbers are a lot higher than anyone wants to admit. Conventional medicine is in denial, but the problem is not going away. Something we’re doing is obviously behind the alarming rates of autism. The current vaccines need to be overhauled ASAP. Vaccine schedule changed at a minimum. 1 in 50 kids is like 1,000,000 kids in a short space of time. This is an epidemic. Its there to see if people just look for themselves.

[…] met with Rep. Jason Chaffetz about investigating the CDC and when Andrew Wakefield and company met with Donald Trump in August and reportedly received a sympathetic hearing. She even claimed that Wakefield gave Trump a copy of […]

[…] of Donald Trump’s long history of rabid antivaccine views, coupled with the other issue of his having met secretly with Andrew Wakefield in August in Florida and, after the election, antivaccine activists seeking to influence him based […]

[…] they meet with federal legislators; sometimes they meet with state legislators; sometimes they meet with Donald Trump. (OK, Wakefield and his fellow travelers only met with Trump once, but once is bad […]

[…] Supporters, published on December 2. I note that that was one month after antivaccine blogger Levi Quackenboss couldn’t keep her mouth shut about the meeting, which occurred in August in Florida and after I and other skeptical bloggers tried to sound the […]

Is there some kind of church or temple you go to for all of this vaccine worship? I have been on this site before. It is an extremely bias site for people looking to enforce their overly enthusiastic opinion of vaccines. If you learn the CDC isn’t revisiting any of Dr. Thorsen’s work, sceinceblogs will say something like “apparently antivaxxers don’t know the difference between financial fraud and scientific fraud”. You can’t even acknowledge a criminal like Thorsen. You make insane arguments like comparing the mercury in Thimerosal to eating a can of tuna. Any rational person wouldn’t make that argument considering the enormous difference between ingestion and injection of toxins (even if babies did eat cans of tuna fish). You act as though Dr. Thompson was taken out of context, when you can search Thompson full audio and listen to him talk for nearly 3 hours on the corruption at the CDC and the dangers of Thimerosal. To you, that’s probably like a religious fanatic being handed a fossil. I am baffled by this site. It really makes me think you are followed by some bizarre cult of vaccine worshipers who lose their minds when anyone dares to question a vaccine, Merck or the CDC.

Hello, jasry16, you would be taken seriously if you would answer a few questions:

1. Please post the PubMed indexed studies by reputable qualified researchers that show any vaccine on the present American pediatric schedule causes more harm than the disease. Measles causes encephalitis in one out of a thousand cases, and death (often from pneumonia) in about one or two in a thousand cases.

1. The MMR can cause encephalitis. It says it right on the insert. (This is where you say “Antivaxxers don’t trust Merck. But, yet they place a lot of faith in their inserts. DERP!”)
2. Thorsen was the main author on 2 Thimerosal studies including the easily debunked Danish study. But, he was involved in 21 CDC Thimerosal studies. I’m not going to answer your question about how being a financial criminal makes him untrustworthy to do scientific research where he is getting grant money from Merck. I’ll just say thank you for proving my point.
3. When did I ever say Thimerosal was in the MMR? I didn’t. I know full well it can’t be in the MMR because MMR is a live virus, and mercury destroys everything in its path (including the brain and nervous system). But, if you listen to Dr. Thompson (full audio), he has plenty of negative things to say about Thimerosal.
4. It is in the flu vaccine that they began pushing on pregnant women as of 2002 just as it was being reduced or removed from other vaccines.

Why won’t they study the Amish population in a vaccinated vs unvaccinated study? 40% never vaccinate. The ones that do only acknowledge that they have received at least one vaccine. It’s strange how the CDC uses different criteria to count the vaccinating Amish. If my kid misses any of the 31 shots by age 18 months, I’m and “antivaxxer”

Not sure why you’re so focused on PubMed. It’s not the most reputable source. But, here are some.

Search Dr. Thompson full audio. It is the unedited phone conversations. Nearly 3 hours. In those conversations, he discusses how the CDC knows that Thimerosal causes tics which, as he says, are 4 times more prevalent in children with autism. He discusses a study called SEED. Despite the CDC having all vaccination records of the subjects in this study (including prenatal), they are excluding them from the study. He says the CDC shouldn’t have authorized the flu vaccine for pregnant women. There is a lot in there. The emails he released related to the MMR study clearly implicate his superiors. I’d say listen to that, and form your own objective opinion. Vaccine worship sites like this one and skepticalraptor would never advise that.

You mean like when he says mercury in Thimerosal causes autism-like features? Why would I waste my time? If you are really interested in hearing what he has to say, go on you tube and search Dr. Thompson full audio. Then, you can grab whatever quotes you want from him.

Something tells me you wouldn’t like the autism rates among the Amish. I have my opinions. But, I don’t get upset when they’re proven wrong. Sites like this one are really more about winning the argument than having a meaningful discussion. I don’t view the kids who are injured by vaccination as collateral damage. If the vaccine court that ruled on Hannah Polling’s case is correct, the vaccines triggered her autism because she had a mitochondrial disorder. This was also confirmed by former CDC Director Dr. Gerberding in her interview with Sanjay Gupta. So, why not research mitochondrial disorder and learn how to identify it? Why continue this ever growing one size fits all vaccine schedule that is more demanding than any other country? It isn’t really working. We have one of the highest infant mortality rates of any developed country.

jasryl6 @123
Mitochondrial disorders are being studied all the time. They are not autism. They are frequently fatal. People with mitochondrial disorders are at high risk of severe effects from any infection, regardless of how it is acquired.

The USA’s suggested vaccination schedule is not “more demanding” than anywhere else in the world, given that we do not give BCG (which works to prevent TB of the brain in children, but does not work against any other form of TB), or yellow fever vaccine, or oral polio vaccine. There are plenty of vaccines that are not given in the US to children on a routine basis. And as soon as polio is confirmed eliminated then we can stop vaccinating against that too.

The infant mortality rate in the US is unacceptably high, primarily due to poor pre-natal care, maternal co-morbidities (diseases or conditions the mother had during pregnancy) and, importantly, how “live birth” is defined in the US. Some deaths that in the US are counted towards infant mortality in countries like Spain are counted as stillbirths or miscarriages.

So, which diseases do you think that children should be vaccinated against? Tetanus? Polio?

Polio? No. It was wiped out due to better hygiene. Dr. Maurice Hilleman admitted the early vaccine was contaminated with SV40 from the monkey kidney that was used. This was confirmed by the CDC in 2013. The CDC says they aren’t sure if SV40 causes cancer. But, Dr. Hilleman said it did.

Measles? Yes. But, parents should be able to get it as separate vaccines. The fact that the option to get the MMR as 3 separate shots was taken away from parents shows where the true priority lies. There is currently a court case in PA involving 2 of the Merck scientists who have admitted they were ordered to lie to bring that vaccine to market. The Mumps part of the vaccine doesn’t work at all.

Hep B on the 1st day of life? Absolutely ridiculous.

Gardasyl? As one of the 3 Merck whistleblowers stated, it was introduced as a way to recoup the losses Merck suffered from Vioxx. It shouldn’t be given to an 11 year old girl. Mark my words. In a couple years, Merck will announce all of the kids who got it need booster shots for it to remain effective. Then, another 10 years down the road, they’ll do it again. It’s a scam. Japan has already linked it to chronic fatigue and ban it.

Flu vaccine – Another money making scam. The insert says it should only be given to pregnant women if clearly needed. The one they give to pregnant women contains 25 mcg of mercury.

Tetanus? Sure. If there is a need for it. If I step on a rusty nail, I’ll get it. Otherwise, I’d be stupid to.

I never said mitochondrial disorders are autism. Watch the interview between Dr. Gerberding and Sanjay Gupta. Dr. Gerberding explains that Hannah likely had this disorder. The high fever that sometimes comes with vaccination could have triggered her “autism-like features”. So, I’m guessing Hannah never had a fever before. Immediately after her 18 month well visit, she developed the fever that sent her into a regression. This is right around the same time as all of these parents in the vaxxed and hear this well videos saw their children regress. They show videos proving their children were developing normally prior. The kids are usually behind on the 31 shots they are supposed to get. So, at 18 months, the MMR is given in combination with a few other vaccines (something that is never studied). Anyway, I guess the important point here is that we can blame the fever. We can blame the kid for having this disorder. We just can’t blame the vaccines.

Mercury does not cause “autism-like” symptoms…..and certainly mercury poisoning is not “autism” either.

And yes, the US vaccine schedule is right in line with every other developed nation….and the Amish are riddled with development and genetic conditions, some so rare that they aren’t seen in the general population at all….not exactly paragons of health.

jasryl6: “1. The MMR can cause encephalitis. It says it right on the insert. (This is where you say “Antivaxxers don’t trust Merck. But, yet they place a lot of faith in their inserts. DERP!”)”

I am sorry, that is not sufficient, package insert were not what was requested. Try reading the request again and providing the verifiable evidence. Make sure that the harm from the MMR vaccine is much more than from the disease. I really do not believe it causes encephalitis in one out of a thousand doses. Does someone need to tellyou the definition of the word “more”?

1. Please post the PubMed indexed studies by reputable qualified researchers</b? that show any vaccine on the present American pediatric schedule causes more harm than the disease. Measles causes encephalitis in one out of a thousand cases, and death (often from pneumonia) in about one or two in a thousand cases.

“4. It is in the flu vaccine that they began pushing on pregnant women as of 2002 just as it was being reduced or removed from other vaccines. ”

Again, read the question again. By definition full grown adult pregnant women are not pediatric patients. The “present” is 2016 not 2002. And do please look up the highlighted words so that you may provide a cogent answer to the requested information:

4. Speaking of thimerosal, please tell us which vaccine on the present American pediatric schedule is only available with thimerosal.

I already told you how you can listen to the full unedited conversations between Dr. Thompson and Dr. Hooker where he clearly states his belief that Thimerosal causes autism-like features and tics. So, you either 1. listened to it and are now trying to forget it. Or, 2. Refused to listen to it for fear it would challenge your faith. Which is it?

Don’t mention how the Tripedia DTaP listed autism under adverse events? Got it. I didn’t know there was a 5 year threshold on what we can or can’t discuss. I guess the Infanrex Hexa vaccine that an Italian court determined caused a child’s autism isn’t up for discussion either since that also happened more than 5 years ago.

You also tell me not to mention influenza even though the vaccine they are currently giving to pregnant women contains Thimerosal. You sure set a lot of rules.

jasryl6: “Something tells me you wouldn’t like the autism rates among the Amish. I have my opinions. But, I don’t get upset when they’re proven wrong.”

Actually we know all about the Amish, and their special set of genetics. They have a limited gene pool, so have a fairly significant set of inherited conditions like Maple Syrup Urine Disease and some other severe genetic seizure disorders.

It is commonly referred to as “vaccine court”. Is that the technical name? No. Who cares? It’s whatever you want to call a specially designed court system that is based on making the vaccine manufacturers completely exempt from lawsuits and liability.

Come back when you have some facts. Hint: repeating the no autism in the Amish myth immediately id’s you as someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It’s right up there with the thimerosal/MMR blunder.

You make insane arguments like comparing the mercury in Thimerosal to eating a can of tuna. Any rational person wouldn’t make that argument considering the enormous difference between ingestion and injection of toxins (even if babies did eat cans of tuna fish)

You don’t feed your children fish? I had toddler who did in fact eat whole cans of tuna for lunch – which means that, yes, I was more concerned about the mercury content consumed than the tiny amounts still in vaccines received. And guess what? Since that toddler made 4th grade honor roll last year it doesn’t seem as though any brain damage occurred anyway. Or maybe I should blame getting in trouble for throwing paper airplanes at fellow students during class on the tuna.

Not sure why you’re so focused on PubMed. It’s not the most reputable source.

Pubmed is a database, not a source.

If my kid misses any of the 31 shots by age 18 months, I’m and “antivaxxer”

No. That’s not it. You are identified as an antivaxxer due to your arguing on the internet against the use of vaccines.

Why continue this ever growing one size fits all vaccine schedule that is more demanding than any other country? It isn’t really working

A year ago I was on chicken pox watch, knowing my 4th grader had been exposed at school due to a fellow student’s vaccine failure. To my knowledge, patient zero at the school was the only who became ill. The vaccine protected all other kids. They are not experiencing waves of their classrooms emptied by infectious disease. The vaccine schedule is working. Deal with it.

You’d think that someone familiar with the “full unedited conversations” between Thompson and Hooker would easily be able to cite the money quotes where Thompson accuses his colleagues of “corruption” or “fraud”.

Curious that jasryl6 is unable or unwilling to do so.

On the other hand, I have no trouble finding an unambiguous statement from Thompson which not only features an absence of such accusations, but includes the following quote:

“I want to be absolutely clear that I believe vaccines have saved and continue to save countless lives. I would never suggest that any parent avoid vaccinating children of any race. Vaccines prevent serious diseases, and the risks associated with their administration are vastly outweighed by their individual and societal benefits.”

And as mistaken as Thompson has been about the significance of the data he wanted to be included in the relevant study, I seriously doubt he’d be doggedly ignorant enough to claim that polio was eliminated “due to better hygiene”.

Strange you would only find the same quote that has been repeated over and over on vaccine worship sites like this one. That quote is not from the recorded phone calls. That quote is from Dr. Thompson after the phone calls were made public and after the CDC gave him a raise and a retention bonus.

Here are some quotes from the recorded conversation. No. They aren’t taken out of context.

“You know, in the United States, the only mercury containing vaccine is for pregnant women. I can say confidently I do think thimerosal causes tics (Tourette’s syndrome). So I don’t know why they still give it to pregnant women. Like that’s the last person that I would give mercury to.”

“Thimerosal from vaccines cause tics.”

“Do you think a pregnant mother would want to take a vaccine that they know caused tics? Absolutely not! I would never give my wife a vaccine that I thought caused tics. I can say tics are four times more prevalent in kids with autism.”

“There is biologic plausibility right now to say that thimerosal causes autism-like features.”

“I have great shame now when I meet a family with kids with autism, because I have been a part of the problem.”

“I shoulder that the CDC has put the research ten years behind. Because the CDC has not been transparent, we’ve missed ten years of research, because the CDC is so paralyzed right now by anything related to autism. They’re not doing what they should be doing. They are afraid to look for things that might be associated.”

“The higher ups wanted to do certain things and I went along with it. I was, in terms of chain in command, I was number four out of the five. Colleen was the Division Chief … Frank is the Director of Immunization Safety. They are still all much more senior than me.”

[email protected] A good thing to wonder. But, I am gobsmacked at the idea that in the US before what? 1955 or so? That in the US, none of us knew how to wash our hands, or clean our houses, or scrub out our toilets. Apparently, we all went from playing in the cesspool to sitting at the dinner table, eating filthy food with our filthy hands.

My youngest son has just been diagnosed with shingles. Unfortunately, he was born in 1968, so I didn’t have the option of vaccination for chicken pox. I can only be grateful that most (not all) of my grandchildren and all of my great grandchildren escaped chicken pox and will escape the danger of having shingles.

People who make stupid statements about polio are the ones I would wish into an iron lung for 24 hours (I’m merciful – I wouldn’t make it more than a day), before I put them in Dara O’Briain’s sack.

Funny how all of the vaccine worshipers keep calling him a psychologist as if that was his only qualification. Up until he said things you don’t want to hear, he was the CDC’s lead Epidemiologist and Statistician. If you listen to the conversations between him and Dr. Hooker, he clearly says that he won’t discuss anything he can’t support with evidence. According to Thompson, the CDC is fully aware that Thimerosal causes tics and has known for some time. If you think he wasn’t qualified to be such a high ranking member of the CDC, ask the CDC why they gave him a big raise and a $25,000 retention bonus to keep him employed there after this story broke. There is no benefit to the mercury being in any vaccine other than a financial benefit to Merck. Yet,, vaccine worshipers like you keep advocating injecting kids and pregnant women with it. That’s pretty sick.

@Ellie- or what “miracle of sanitation and hygiene” occurred in the US during the 1960s to see a precipitous drop in the incidence of measles……or what leap in hygiene led to the elimination of rubella in the Western Hemisphere….

Or how about what happened in the US during the late 1980s and early 90’s to see a 95% drop in the incidence of HiB?

Also, more than 75% of all Flu vaccines manufactured today are in single dose vials….and when researchers were looking at Thimerosal back in 2002, they had trouble locating any vaccines for their study that did still contain it.

These anti-vaxers just aren’t going to let this go…just another example of them being part of a simple belief system & not relying on any scientific data to support their views.

Vaccine manufacturers aren’t “exempt.” They still have to get their vaccines approved through the exact same process as every other drug….only about 7% of new vaccines get approved – meaning hundreds of millions of dollars spent on R&D results in very small returns, based on that low level of approval.

Vaccine safety and efficacy is also tracked by multiple active and passive surveillance mechanisms, worldwide.

Vaccine manufacturers are exempt from lawsuits, and it is highly profitable. They can’t be sued, They don’t need to advertise. It is the only product that the government can force people to buy. Why don’t you look at how much Paul Offit pocketed after voting to add a vaccine to the schedule that he held the patent to. (Rotavirus). There’s no conflict of interest there though. Right? Of course not. Not, when you’re a vaccine worshiper.

Or how about what happened in the US during the late 1980s and early 90’s to see a 95% drop in the incidence of HiB?

Yes. It’s funny how they never mention Hib.

I have a friend who wears a locket around her neck, with the name of a little girl engraved upon it. My friend’s mother was widowed in her late 30s. She remarried at 40 to a man with no children. The following year their only child together, a daughter, was born. Happy family. Until the little girl died, age 3, of Hib meningitis. This was prior to the vaccine.

No it isn’t odd. The Hib isn’t one of the vaccines with serious safety concerns. Not all vaccines are bad. If the CDC and Merck just allowed parents to continue getting the MMR as 3 separate shots, there would be more kids being vaccinated for measles. Maybe we wouldn’t have had those 250 measles cases in California that everyone lost their minds over. (zero deaths and a bunch of kids who got lifetime immunity). The mercury-containing flu shot shouldn’t be given to pregnant women. Gardasyl is a dangerous vaccine that should have never been approved. While I’m sure there are some, most “antivaxxers” aren’t against every vaccine. Sorry for your loss.

None of them show more harm from the vaccine than the disease. Most are from unqualified folks like the Geiers and DeLong. Hint: if someone has their medical license legally revoked they are not reputable, and if they are professor of finance they are not qualified.

And no where has the fool answered this question, possibly because it requires him to actually think instead of cut and paste:

4. Speaking of thimerosal, please tell us which vaccine on the present American pediatric schedule is only available with thimerosal.

This one states that for everyone 1 vaccine that ultimately makes it through the approval process, 4 – 5 of them do not….not quite the 7% number I’ve seen, but it does support that most vaccines aren’t approved.

There is currently a court case in PA involving 2 of the Merck scientists who have admitted they were ordered to lie to bring that vaccine to market. The Mumps part of the vaccine doesn’t work at all.

Details required. What is the Court?

That’s Krahling & Wlochowski’s qui tam action under the False Claims Act. Maybe I’ll look up the docket after I’ve had coffee. Their assertion is not that “the Mumps part of the vaccine doesn’t work at all.”

Thompson (a psychologist as I recall) can “think” all he likes that thiomeral causes tics and autism-like features.

In fact, in the recorded calls, he attempted to dissuade Hooker from going after the autism angle and instead using the tics paper as the thin edge of the wedge. Matt Carey goes through this at LB/RB as I recall, if someone wants to look it up for me.

Please try to read more carefully.
jasryl6 believes (or pretends to believe) that Tourette tics and autism are interchangeable. I begin to suspect that jasryl6 doesn’t really care about autism (or about reality in general).

Actually, rather than go back and listen to 3 hours of recorded conversation to pick out quotes, I took those quotes from Ben Swann Truth in Media. The quotes are accurate. Talk about cherry picking! You have nothing to say about all of those quotes from Dr. Thompson. Instead, you focus on one word that you can argue about. This is exactly what I mean when I say “vaccine worship”. You can’t even allow yourselves to question them.

Thanks, Narad. And still the minor increase in tics was just random, just like the deliberate p-hacking in the “eating chocolate helps with weight loss.” You take a small number of subjects (a bit over a thousand children) and check for lots of stuff (42 things), you will find one anomaly.

Orac even says: “When running 42 tests, it would be shocking if there were not a few anomalous findings. What makes the study authors fairly confident that the findings are anomalous is that they were divided roughly equally in both directions, good and bad.”

Be sure to check the comments from other bloggers that Orac added later to that post.

[email protected]: Regarding your comment on how profitable vaccines are for manufacturers I think that you have missed the issue of frequency. Vaccines are (for the most part) a few in a lifetime. Even the influenza vaccine is merely yearly (and not required for most adults).
But there are tons of pharmaceuticals (prescription and OTC) that are taken daily, often for extended times or even for the whole of life.
So what’s more profitable, a vaccine that is given maybe 3 times in a lifetime, or diabetes medication that is taken daily?
The profit motive just isn’t there for vaccines.

I have to disagree. Of course, there are some very profitable pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical industry does a good job pushing their drugs and making big money. But, vaccines have the benefit of greater protection. If your vaccine gets added to the schedule, nearly every kid in America is getting it (sometimes 4 times with the boosters). They don’t need to advertise. But, they’ve been doing that lately too. Like the Trimemba ad where they try to convince parents that their kid might get Hep C and die if he shares a drink with his friend. For the non-mandated ones, they’re working to correct that as well. Hospitals guilt their employees and threaten them if they don’t get the flu shot. Doctors guilt parents into getting their teen daughter the Gardasyl shot. They plan to grow from a $30 billion per year industry to a $100 billion industry in just a few years. Given how insanely pro-vaccine the brainwashed American public has become, it will probably happen.

Vaccines are one of the least profitable biologics / pharmaceuticals on the market….they require hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D, most in development don’t get approved, and they are given very few times over the life of a person….not to mention the increased cost of post-release surveillance as well.

If the CDC and Merck just allowed parents to continue getting the MMR as 3 separate shots, there would be more kids being vaccinated for measles.

How many more? Do show your work.

Maybe we wouldn’t have had those 250 measles cases in California that everyone lost their minds over. (zero deaths and a bunch of kids who got lifetime immunity).

You seem to have a bad habit of playing free and loose with facts. There were 147 domestic cases (not all in California) and at least 136 in Lanaudière. And now everybody gets to play SSPE roulette. Yay?

@150
jasryl6 bought into the ‘Paul Offit voted himself rich’ nonsense by asking: “Why don’t you look at how much Paul Offit pocketed after voting to add a vaccine to the schedule that he held the patent to. (Rotavirus).

Of course, Offit left the Advisory Council on Immunization Practices three years before the RotaTeq vaccine that he developed was voted onto the pediatric immunization schedule. Perhaps jasryl6 is confused by the fact that a competitor for the vaccine that Offit worked 25 years to develop was approved in early 1998, mere months before Offit was allowed to vote in that Council. Offit didn’t vote to approve either the competing vaccine (that could have made it difficult to market the vaccine that he was developing) or for his own vaccine—but perhaps jasryl6 will still think it’s a nice story if the facts are ignored.

jasryl6 @172: A couple of things, just to be clear.
1) Trimemba is for meningitis, not HepC. I had to get a meningitis shot when I went to college (private school requirement) and while it’s generally rare it can also be fatal in a matter of hours, yeah, I took it. (I really, really wish there were a HepC vaccine. It’s a huge problem among homeless and IDU veterans and I would *love* to be able to get on top of it.
2) US labor laws allow an employer to demand almost anything of their employees. So there’s that for starters. And I think that it is right that the people who are working with the sickest and most vulnerable be expected to take more precautions. Or do you think it’s not reasonable to ask doctors and nurses to wash their hands?
3) I got the very first version of Gardasil (no y) and I was thrilled. Hello, preventing cancer? Who doesn’t want to prevent cancer? And that was 10 years ago, so it’s not like there hasn’t been follow up on million of women and girls. Oh, and it’s for boys now too. And preventing cancer is clearly *not* a money making venture since most cancers are very expensive to treat.

You are right about Trimemba. I was going on memory.
I don’t think Gardasyl prevents cancer. I know 2 people that had serious complications from it. Fatigue and frequent pain. One of them passed out right in the Dr. office. They were aware of that being a potential side effect. Why would they put out a vaccine that they know causes people to faint? How can someone say vaccines don’t affect someone’s neurology if they can make you pass out? Why vaccinate an 11 year old for something that will affect them closer to the age of 50? Gardasyl is no longer used in Japan. They linked it to chronic fatigue. I’m pretty sure Australia stopped using it as well.

Interesting. Where did you get that information? I haven’t seen any claim that he made nothing off selling the patent after the vaccine was added to the schedule. Is there a vaccine worship site I don’t know about that is even more loyal to Merck than this one?

I like how jasryl keeps saying we worship vaccines. Does Jasryl worship tables? Cornerstones? Anything that does it’s job in an easily verifiable way? They might as well give up going to church and sit at the local mechanic’s shop for an hour.

And here are meeting minutes of ACIP in 2006, if you look on the fourth page you will see that Dr. Offit is not listed with the ACIP Members, but further down representing his hospital under “Guest Presenters, Press and Members of the Public.”

“If the CDC and Merck just allowed parents to continue getting the MMR as 3 separate shots, there would be more kids being vaccinated for measles.”

Please provide the PubMed indexed studies by reputable qualified researchers that the MMR vaccine that has been used in the USA since 1978 causes more harm than measles, mumps and rubella. Wakefield and his friends are not reputable.

Chris, Dr. Offit’s “last year as an ACIP member” was, as I recall, 2003. The ACIP voted to approve RotaTeq in February 2006, two years and 9 months after Dr. Offit left the committee. jasryl6, like the delusional horde at AoA, is far off base.

brian: “Chris, Dr. Offit’s “last year as an ACIP member” was, as I recall, 2003”

Ooops. You are correct, thank you. That is a stupid typo, mostly because I was rushed. I was about to go somewhere, but just as I was finishing dear hubby walked in and actually wanted to have a conversation about his day (okay, he has been working lots of overtime, so it was more of a vent).

Just to explain to our current not very good troll why I emphasised that Thompson is a psychologist: a psychologist, certainly here and depending on which branch of psychology their post-grad training was in, would not necessarily have any training or expertise in autism or tic disorders. And if he’s working in the sort of job Thompson was would have little clinical experience of either.

A number of the regular-ish posters here have more relevant knowledge and experience…

Offitt did not vote “to add a vaccine to the schedule that he held the patent to.”

Interesting. Where did you get that information? I haven’t seen any claim that he made nothing off selling the patent after the vaccine was added to the schedule.

Now some would say that there is little scope for argument with someone who is shameless enough to take the statement (demonstrably true) that Paul Offit did not vote on the Rotateq vaccine and turn it into a garbled claim that Offit made no money. I could not possibly comment.
Fortunately I am not here to win arguments with feckwit trolls, but simply to kick arse and chew bubblegum, and the good news is that I have plenty of bubblegum.

Narad: Vaccine manufacturers are exempt from lawsuits, and it is highly profitable. They can’t be sued,
…
There is currently a court case in PA involving 2 of the Merck scientists who have admitted they were ordered to lie to bring that vaccine to market.

Yes, mendacity troll is telling us that (a) “Vaccine manufacturers can’t be sued”, and (b) “Here is a vaccine manufacturer being sued”.
But troll has also told us that Thompson was (a) “the CDC’s lead Epidemiologist and Statistician”, and (b) a lowly minion, “number four out of the five” who went along with bad decisions that he could not influence.

I wonder if jasryl6 unwrapped the Xmas presents early and found a copy of “How to Win Arguments and Convince People through Bullsh1t and Self-Contradictions”.

It doesn’t matter what you think, or more correctly, assume. What matters is what the evidence says. And the evidence says that since Gardasil has been introduced, the number of new cervical cancers has halved. In addition, oral and throat cancers have also fallen thanks to Gardasil.

It depends on how you define autism. They actually have a higher chance of from very nasty neurological disorders than the average population due to the limited gene pool. This is why they are a well studied population, including a few on autism.

About Hannah Poling, you also said: “The high fever that sometimes comes with vaccination could have triggered her “autism-like features”. So, I’m guessing Hannah never had a fever before.”

Wrong. Her vaccines were delayed because of a series of ear infections. From: http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1721109,00.html : “Because of a series of ear infections, Hannah had fallen behind in the vaccine schedule, so in a single day she was given five inoculations covering a total of nine diseases: measles, mumps, rubella, polio, varicella, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, and Haemophilus influenzae.”

Now where are the PubMed indexed studies by reputable qualified researchers that the MMR vaccine used in the USA since 1978 causes more harm than measles, mumps and rubella.

Considering your string of absolute wrongness, and not even being able to follow the links that have been given to you, that is not a surprise. Perhaps it is because you are having trouble with reading comprehension, I have asked you for studies by reputable qualified researchers that show a greater harm from vaccines than the diseases, and you just posted a bunch of nonsense.

Hint: Autism is not worse than measles, and nor is it worse than most diseases, and it is not caused by any vaccine. Also someone whose medical license was revoked is not reputable.

I’m sure you are aware there are numerous other doctors besides Wakefield who dare to question vaccine safety despite the obvious consequences. Dr. Wakefield’s co-author, Dr. John Walker Smith, for example, stood by the Lancet paper. But, he won his case in court and had his license restored.
You want proof that the MMR is more dangerous than measles. I never said it was. I don’t view vaccine injured kids as collateral damage.
“Autism is not worse than measles”
What a dumb thing to say! Tell that to all of the non-verbal autistic kids who can’t care for themselves. According to the CDC, the risk of death from measles is 1 in 1,000. Parents used to try to get their kids the measles just like they did with the chicken pox. Autism affects as many as 1 in 48 males in the U.S.

You never answered my questions? Why do you ask me not to mention the Tripedea DTaP? Because it lists autism under adverse events? Are you aware that a court in Italy ruled the vaccine Infanrix Hexa vaccine caused a child’s autism. In the GSK document, it shows 6 cases of autism reported during clinical trials. I also pointed out that you clearly lied about Dr. Thompson considering I provided you with a way to hear the unedited conversations with Dr. Hooker. Did you listen to it? Or, are you afraid to? In case you missed the quotes I posted earlier, here is just some of what you will listen to from Dr. Thompson. I’m sure you will now be dismissing him as an antivaxxer.

“You know, in the United States, the only mercury containing vaccine is for pregnant women. I can say confidently I do think thimerosal causes tics. So I don’t know why they still give it to pregnant women. Like that’s the last person that I would give mercury to.”

“Thimerosal from vaccines cause tics.”

“Do you think a pregnant mother would want to take a vaccine that they know caused tics? Absolutely not! I would never give my wife a vaccine that I thought caused tics. I can say tics are four times more prevalent in kids with autism.”

“There is biologic plausibility right now to say that thimerosal causes autism-like features.”

“I have great shame now when I meet a family with kids with autism, because I have been a part of the problem.”

“I shoulder that the CDC has put the research ten years behind. Because the CDC has not been transparent, we’ve missed ten years of research, because the CDC is so paralyzed right now by anything related to autism. They’re not doing what they should be doing. They are afraid to look for things that might be associated.”

“The higher ups wanted to do certain things and I went along with it. I was, in terms of chain in command, I was number four out of the five. Colleen was the Division Chief … Frank is the Director of Immunization Safety. They are still all much more senior than me.”

Duly noted. But it is just a starting point mostly to avoid youtube videos and random conspiracy websites. I am not sure a blanket suggestion to use https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/pmresources.html is going to help, since it does include PubMed.

Also, these clowns have no idea how to type in http://www.pubmed.gov, much less how to use the more refined bit if the Medline database. From the Fact Sheet: MEDLINE, PubMed, and PMC (PubMed Central): How are the different?… it says:

MEDLINE is the largest subset of PubMed. You may limit your PubMed search retrieval to MEDLINE citations by restricting your search to the MeSH controlled vocabulary or by using the Journal Categories filter called MEDLINE.

Yeah, they are going to figure out the “MeSH controlled vocabulary” right after they figure out what “more harm than” means. You will note, that I often do not get a valid reply with my PubMed indexed request.

jasryl6 asked, “Why would they put out a vaccine that they know causes people to faint?”

Patients faint with equal frequency whether they are injected with the Gardasil vaccine or with saline placebo.

It happens that young females–the original target population for Gardasil–faint more commonly than most other humans when they are injected, see their own blood, etc. This is true even for female military recruits (who faint about twice as frequently as male recruits) although they may be tougher than most of us, male or female.

This is exactly what I’m talking about. Classic vaccine worship. People commenting on scienceblogs and skepticalraptor are incapable of saying anything negative about a vaccine.
“On June 9, 2009, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a revised label for Gardasil, a vaccine to protect against cervical, vulvar and vaginal cancers caused by Human Papillomavirus (HPV) types 16 and 18 and genital warts caused by HPV types 6 and 11. In the new label, information pertaining to syncope (fainting) is now also included in the Warnings and Precautions section, and this section has new information noting that individuals who faint sometimes have tonic-clonic (jerking) movements and seizure-like activity.

jasryl6 @183:
A few more things: Lots of things make people pass out. These include: getting shots, having blood drawn, seeing their own blood, watching someone else have blood drawn, low blood sugar, heat, and emotional shock.
Gardasil is still used in Australia, where it has much better uptake than in the US and has substantially reduced the rate of new cervical cancers. (See Julian’s link at 201).
Why vaccinate against HPV at 11 if it might not cause cancer until 50? Because 50 is when the cancer is diagnosed, not when your first got the virus that causes the cancer. It’s not a one day HPV, next day cancer kind of thing. It takes years to develop. So why not protect children before they are ever exposed?
Unless you think that all girls and women love being up in those stirrups, cranked open with a speculum and scraped away. Try having some compassion for people who’ve experienced sexual assault and can not handle a pelvic exam. And have some compassion for all the women of the world who have no access to regular PAP smears or pelvic exams but might be able to complete a vaccine series.

” Hospitals guilt their employees and threaten them if they don’t get the flu shot.”

Someone who does not worship at the altar of Antivax might deduce that the reason for mandating flu vaccination of health care workers is to protect elderly, immunocompromised and otherwise vulnerable patients.

Seems like a good thing to me (and I’m one of those health care workers who gets an annual flu shot).
Also, the Pharma perks are _awesome_. 🙂

jasryl6: “Tell that to all of the non-verbal autistic kids who can’t care for themselves.”

My oldest child has autism. I am presently reading a book co-authored by an autistic person. It is called The Gentle Push, and one of the authors is Temple Grandin. Perhaps you have heard of her? She has a PhD. I know it would be pointless for me to request you provide the verifiable documentation that 1 out of 48 males in the USA are “non-verbal autistic kids who can’t care for themselves.” (by the way, my oldest was non-verbal at age three, but there is this thing called “speech therapy”)

“Parents used to try to get their kids the measles just like they did with the chicken pox.”

Wrong. That was for rubella (German measles), and mostly for girls to prevent congenital rubella syndrome (a known cause of autism, along with other nasty things like death). Prior to the vaccine almost every child got measles (rubeola) before their fifteenth birthday. That is why it is assumed anyone born before 1957 has had measles. Read this (the blue letters mean it is a link to another web page):http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S4.long

“Why do you ask me not to mention the Tripedea DTaP?”

Now, this is why I question your reading comprehension. I told you it was discontinued five years ago, and even included a link (again, do you even notice some of the words were blue?). It is no longer available, it is not sold and is not on the present American pediatric schedule. What part of that do you not understand?

Due to your reading comprehension issues, I would not trust any of the quotes you claim from Thompson. Also, I explained more than once that Thompson’s whining about tics and thimerosal was due to jumping on one result based on measuring lots of stuff on just a thousand test subjects. Obviously you do not understand the basics of statistics and p-hacking, because if you have reading problems you more than likely do not understand any math.

Now again, please post the PubMed indexed studies by reputable qualified researchers that the MMR vaccine that has been used in the USA since 1978 causes more harm than measles, mumps and rubella.

And since you want to make lots of claims about autism and vaccines, you should answer another thing. The first MMR in the USA was introduced in 1971, the one used now was the preferred vaccine for the 1978 Measles Elimination Program. Please provide verifiable documentation dated before 1990 that the rate of autism rose in the USA coincident with the use of any MMR vaccine during the 1970s and 1980s. It could be anything, as long as it is verifiable, like government surveys of disabilities or education populations (but it must be available online for all to read, so include a link!).

This would help Wakefield, because it would show that there was data for him to base his hypothesis on. The USA is much bigger than the UK, and had been using an MMR for almost twenty years before the UK introduced theirs in 1988. So if an MMR vaccine caused autism it would have noticed in a very big country using it for more that twenty years before Wakefield did his study.

Let’s talk about your reading comprehension. It is absolutely terrible. I never said all kids with autism are non-verbal. I was responding to your insane statement that getting the measles is worse than having autism. I said “tell that to all of the non-verbal autistic kids..” If you think that implies that I think every kid on the spectrum is non-verbal, you need serious work on your reading comprehension.

I know that the Tripedea DTaP isn’t part of the schedule. My point was, on fda.gov, it still listed autism under adverse events. So, I questioned if that might be the reason you don’t want to talk about it. I’m fully aware of what adverse events means.

Due to your reading comprehension issues, I would think that you would just search Dr. Thompson full audio, and listen. But, maybe you have issues understanding what you hear as well. Or, you are just terrified of what you might hear. There is a lot more than just what I quoted there.

I never said the MMR is directly responsible for the rise in autism. I didn’t say it was the dramatic increase in the schedule (which does correlate with the rise in autism). I didn’t say it was only because of Thimerosal either. In fact, I never even said it was only because of vaccines. I think there are several other factors involved.

You clearly never read the Dr. Wakefield Lancet study. The study never concluded that the MMR causes autism.

My main issue with vaccines is that they need to be made safer. Thimerosal needs to be removed completely. Further testing needs to be done on the MMR. I think the schedule is way too demanding. But, what motivation does Merck have to produce the safest vaccines possible when a brainwashed American public has become so pro-vaccine? Thanks to a costly PR campaign, it is at the point where no one can even question them without people losing their minds. What benefit does Thimerosal have other than a financial benefit to Merck? NONE. So, why would anyone support Merck’s decision to continue using it?

However, it happens that that’s true whether the syncope follows the sight of blood, exercise, vaccination, or acupuncture. It happens that adolescent girls, the target population for the initial anti-HPV vaccination efforts, are particularly prone to fainting. So?

Note that other vaccines given in adolescence, just like exercise, laceration, wound repair, and blood draws are similarly associated with risk of “fainting, tonic-clonic (jerking) movements and seizure-like activity.” Gardasil-associated fainting, rare as it is, would be even less of a problem if the vaccine was routinely given only to middle-aged people, but then it wouldn’t be particularly effective given that many in that population, unlike young adolescents, would probably have already been infected with HPV.

Oh, by the way: regarding “the Tripedia DTaP listed autism under adverse events,” you should understand that vaccine package inserts are intended to be read at about the sixth-grade level. Accordingly, a sixth-grader should be able to help you to understand the difference between an event that was reported to have happened some time after vaccination and an event that was determined to have been caused by vaccination. Note that the Tripedia package insert also includes Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in that list, and that (stay with me now) since SIDS deaths are classified as SIDS deaths because they have NOT been attributed to any specific cause, your suggestion that the inclusion of autism alongside SIDS in that list implies causality is, at best, woefully ignorant.

Did you see the blue-coloured words in my comment? That’s a hyperlink. Click on it.
#205:

Dr. John Walker Smith, for example, stood by the Lancet paper. But, he won his case in court and had his license restored.

1. Walker-Smith did not “stand by the Lancet Paper”. After his appeal, his own lawyer declared the vaccine autism causation hypothesis disproven.
2. Walker-Smith’s appeal was basically “Wakefield deceived me”. It doesn’t exonerate Wakefield, it damages him further.

According to the CDC, the risk of death from measles is 1 in 1,000.

Death is not the only possible negative outcome from measles. My driving instructor was deaf in one ear thanks to measles.

Are you aware that a court in Italy ruled the vaccine Infanrix Hexa vaccine caused a child’s autism.

1. Nope. Wrong vaccine. The Court ruled that MMR caused a child’s autism.
2. The verdict was overturned by a higher Court, which also criticised the lower Court for including Wakefield’s “Case Study” as evidence.

There was a second ruling of the Tribunal of Milan in 2014 in a civil case against the Italian Government claiming that Infanrix Hexa SK vaccine caused autism. The expert appointed by the Judge in the case stated that the mercury in the vaccine could be the only cause of autism in this case.

Walker-Smith repudiated the fraudulent 1998 Wakefield et al paper’s “interpretation” (conclusions) section, alongside nine other co-authors in 2004. This is the section that claims an association in time between regressive autism and MMR.

In the High Court, his lawyer submitted on his behalf, that no respectable body of opinion now supported the claim that MMR causes autism. That was a formal submission, and it was adopted in the judgment.

As you can discover in a recent online conversation between Wakefield and JB Handley (who, of course, didn’t follow up the meaning of this) Walker-Smith has never spoken to Wakefield again.

The reason you goal-posting shifting specials don’t blast Hib has nothing to do with its safety profile. Otherwise, you’d leave varicella alone. You don’t go after it because you cannot even attempt to make a case against it. You can’t point to “sanitation and hygiene” as the primary factors contributing to the massive decline in Hib disease since the introduction of the shot. You got nothin’, so you leave it alone.

I think I get it. You are one of those “if you question any vaccine, you are automatically against every vaccine and idolize Jenny McCarthy and hate science” people. It couldn’t be that I think the MMR needs further independent study, Thimerosal needs to be eliminated completely, and the schedule has gotten too demanding. Nope. Because it’s all or nothing. Right? Either you trust Merck and the CDC completely and happily inject your kids with whatever they put out. Or, you are a stupid antivaxxer.

1. Improved sanitation/hygiene.
2. It was on the decline before the introduction of the vaccine.
3. The illness isn’t that big of a deal.
4. We all had it as kids and it was no big whoop.
5. Nobody ever dies from it.

Yeah, they are going to figure out the “MeSH controlled vocabulary” right after they figure out what “more harm than” means. You will note, that I often do not get a valid reply with my PubMed indexed request.

True enough, but in a Pubmed search, all but the newest papers will carry the annotation “Indexed for MEDLINE,” so the filters aren’t strictly necessary (although I find them very helpful, which is why I set up an account).

Are you aware that a court in Italy ruled the vaccine Infanrix Hexa vaccine caused a child’s autism.

Yes. I can even tell you the name of the child’s attorney.

In the GSK document, it shows 6 cases of autism reported during clinical trials.

Have you gone through this 1271-page document to be able to put your statement into context? It’s kind of a pain in the ass, given that the column heads aren’t repeated at the top of each table page, but I’ll wait.

It’s actually a simple word search. You can search “autism” and find the information.https://autismoevaccini.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/vaccin-dc3a9cc3a8s.pdf
I’m finished here. Maybe the rest of the people in your vaccine worship center will see this. I have done this once before, and it is amusing but time consuming. It’s like walking into a church filled with fundamentalist Christians and challenging the existence of God. So many people responding. I don’t have time to address them all. No. They haven’t proven me wrong by siting information from their own vaccine worship sites. No. The MMR hasn’t been proven safe unless you discount the thousands of parents who all have the same story of their child’s regression after the MMR or the studies that show a link. Chemmomo and Chris are taking my words out of context. Everyone is avoiding the fact that you can listen to the unedited recordings of Dr. Thompson because it is the equivalent of showing a fundamentalist Christian a fossil. This vaccine worshiping cult still keeps trying to defend the idea of injecting pregnant women with mercury. To me, that is just sick. One day, they will realize it. I have heard it all before. “correlation doesn’t equal causation”, I get it. You love vaccines. You probably can’t even acknowledge that some people are severely damaged by them. Your faith in vaccines surpasses even the very people who develop them. And, whether it’s Dr. Maurice Hilleman, Dr. William Thompson, the former FDA official who said flu vaccines are worthless, or any of the doctors in the vaxxed videos….whoever it is, it doesn’t matter. Once they question the vaccines, they are dismissed as antivaxxers. If this cult following at scienceblogs celebrates Christmas, then Merry Christmas! Time for me to move on. I have turned off notifications. But, have fun talking among yourselves.

How much safer would you like them to be? What (to you) is an acceptable ratio of shots to adverse events?

Thimerosal needs to be removed completely. Further testing needs to be done on the MMR.

Spoken like a true antivaxxer. Vaccines are among the most thoroughly tested medical products in existence. What level of testing would satisfy you? Oh, and most vaccines have thimerosal free versions.

I think the schedule is way too demanding.

“Too many too soon”. Investigated and disproven. Use the SEARCH box up top.

What benefit does Thimerosal have other than a financial benefit to Merck? NONE.

It allows vaccines to not need refrigeration. In fact, several organisations that supported thimerosal’s removal now say that had they known then what they now now, they would have pushed for its retention.

jasryl6: “Let’s talk about your reading comprehension. It is absolutely terrible. I never said all kids with autism are non-verbal.”

Interesting. Lets see what you said, and these are your exact words: “Tell that to all of the non-verbal autistic kids who can’t care for themselves. According to the CDC, the risk of death from measles is 1 in 1,000. Parents used to try to get their kids the measles just like they did with the chicken pox. Autism affects as many as 1 in 48 males in the U.S.”

Now how would a reasonable person interpret that particular arrangement of words? You are saying autism is worse than measles deaths because of some random number your read somewhere. You also very strongly implied that the number represented all autistic persons.

Well, now you really need to provide some verifiable evidence for that number, and give more detail about what it means. Break it down what percentage of the total with an autism study are “non-verbal who can care for themselves, versus the rest. Then tell us how many of the total would have received an autism diagnosis under DSM II (1968), DSM III (1980, and DSM III-R in 1987), DSM IV (1994) and finally DSM V (2013).

Also, for those who are diagnosed under DSM V, please tell the percent who are Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3.

“You clearly never read the Dr. Wakefield Lancet study. The study never concluded that the MMR causes autism.”

I did read it. Perhaps it is because Wakefield did not read his own paper, because at the press conference he told parents to use separate vaccines, without any evidence for that suggestion. And he has been playing that tune for almost twenty years. Have you even heard about his moved “VAXXED”?

Wakefield evidence free announce that parents get single jabs had its own consequences, parents seeking separate vaccines had to go to private clinics. Before Wakefield published his paper, the UK had changed the MMR vaccines to remove those with the Urabe mumps strain (which had a higher than acceptical level of asceptic meningitis) to the Jeryl Lynn. But it was also hard to get single mumps vaccine, so some private clinics were illegally importing some with the Urabe mumps strain:MEDICINES CONTROL AGENCY TO OBJECT TO IMPORTATION OF UNLICENSED SINGLE URABE STRAIN MUMPS VACCINE

“Further testing needs to be done on the MMR.”

Why? For what? It has been used safely since 1978, that is almost forty years. You are making a claim, now support that claim. Provide the PubMed indexed studies by reputable qualfied researchers than the present American MMR vaccine causes more harm than measles, mumps and rubella.

I think I get it. You are one of those “if you question any vaccine, you are automatically against every vaccine and idolize Jenny McCarthy and hate science” people. It couldn’t be that I think the MMR needs further independent study, Thimerosal needs to be eliminated completely, and the schedule has gotten too demanding. Nope. Because it’s all or nothing. Right? Either you trust Merck and the CDC completely and happily inject your kids with whatever they put out. Or, you are a stupid antivaxxer.

jasryl6: “The MMR hasn’t been proven safe unless you discount the thousands of parents who all have the same story of their child’s regression after the MMR or the studies that show a link. Chemmomo and Chris are taking my words out of context.”

First you need to prove those thousands of parents actually exist, and are not same folks who keep repeating what they thought happened. The Autism Omnibus Proceeding was set up to deal with the five thousand who filed, so three of the best cases were brought forward. They all lost, and the others with less “evidence” were dismissed:http://www.uscfc.uscourts.gov/omnibus-autism-proceeding

For the MMR test case, it turned out that video records showed the child had autistic behaviors before she got the vaccine. There is a link to the decisions in the link above.

Neither Chemmomo nor I took your words out of context. I directly quoted all of the sentences where you mentioned “non-verbal”, “can’t care for themselves”, the measles deaths were one out of a thousand cases, and there are one in 48 males with autism. You put that jumble together, next time be a bit more clear.

And still waiting for any verifiable study by qualified reputable researchers than the MMR vaccine used in the USA since 1978 causes more harm than measles, mumps and rubella.

You have also not presented any verifiable evidence dated before 1990 that autism went up during the 1970s and 1980s with the use of the 1971 and 1978 American MMR vaccines.

Are you even aware that there are different versions of MMR vaccines? In 1988 the UK introduced three different ones, and then in 1992 withdrew the two that had the Urabe mumps component. Which makes us wonder which MMR vaccine was Wakefield Lancet study on? One of the three that had been introduced in 1988? But why was there an American child? And did he have a plan to study the final replacement MMR vaccine that the UK introduced in 1998?

Do you know? Do you even understand? Still, the one used in the USA is almost forty years old, plenty of time for data. So do find those PubMed indexed studies by researchers that it has caused more harm than the diseases.

“It’s like walking into a church filled with fundamentalist Christians and challenging the existence of God.”

While jasryl6 considers this a devastating insult (why do you hate religion, jasryl6?), in reality the fundamentalist comparison applies nicely to a lot of antivaxers. Not only do they cling to nonsensical dogma, they actually equate their beliefs with religion. Example: the folks over at Age of Autism, who explained their banning of comments from pro-vaccine posters by saying that a church wouldn’t allow nonbelievers to come in and make fun of religion.

As for parents deliberately trying to infect their kids with measles, I never heard of this before it was reported in the case of some modern antivaxers. Back in pre-vaccine days no one had to have a measles party or its equivalent, since the disease was so commonplace. Kids (like me) just ran the gauntlet of childhood diseases and if we and our parents were fortunate, it just meant being miserably sick and out of school for weeks (if not so lucky, it meant a trip to the hospital, long-term complications or worse).

It’s like walking into a church filled with fundamentalist Christians and challenging the existence of God. So many people responding. I don’t have time to address them all. No. They haven’t proven me wrong by siting (sic) information from their own vaccine worship sites.

Actually you were proven wrong by not providing actual data to your arguments by blatant assertion. You never gave valid answers to the requests for data to back up those assertions. But how can we expect you to provide a real citation when you cannot spell “citing” correctly?

[…] large part of what fueled the election of Donald Trump, who is himself an antivaccine loon and even met with Andrew Wakefield back in August. (There’s even a picture.) It’s not for nothing that I fear for medical science under […]

[…] that vaccines are a “monster shot” that causes autism and has met with, of all people, Andrew Wakefield to discuss vaccine policy. 2016 was a year when Deepak Chopra castigated our new President-Elect […]

[…] was going to meet with longtime antivaccine crank Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Remembering how Trump had met with antivaccine “hero” Andrew Wakefield before the election and how after the election antivaccine activists were practically salivating […]

Be careful about calling anyone a liar. It is not only libelling but unprofessional for anyone who calls him/herself a journalist. Let me inform you that I know hundreds of families whose entire life was destroyed by immense vaccination. In many cases children were videotaped or photographed before and after that. The difference is visible and shocking. If you had seen an infant like that with your eyes you would also say there sholud be more sensibly planned vaccination scheme and vaccines sholud be given later and and only one at a time. They should also be tested for safety again and some dangerous and allergic components should be removed. That’s what Andrew Wakefield and Del Bigtree’s film is campaigning for. That is the truth and I wonder if you have the sense of justice to post this uncensored.

Trump is a liar, and I can say that as much as I like to because he is President-Elect. As for Wakefield, I said he’s either stupid or a liar, take your pick.

Also, vaccines ARE already among the most heavily tested pharmaceuticals in existence. Bigtree and Wakefield are ignorant, and their film is such a shameless piece of propaganda that it’d make Leni Reifenstahl, if she were still alive, gasp and say, “Zu viel!”

anyone who calls him/herself a journalist.
I can’t see anyone in this thread calling him / herself a journalist, which leaves me wondering whether Kristina is mistakenly responding to some other blog entirely.

In many cases children were videotaped or photographed before and after that. The difference is visible and shocking.
She also mistakenly forgot to link to the evidence for her claims.

Orac, given that Mr. Wakefield has been proven to have published fraudulent research on vaccines, I think it would be quite safe to call him a liar. He’d have a hard time suing someone for defamation for calling him one over the subject given his history, even in Britain.

[Wakefield ]’d have a hard time suing someone for defamation for calling him one over the subject given his history

You will recall his various gestures in the direction of defamation suits, generally abandoned at the last minute coitus-interruptus-style just before an actual appearance in court, almost as if their real purpose was sucker-bait.

[…] Commissioner. As you might imagine, particularly after his having met with antivaccinationists like Andrew Wakefield and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., I am concerned, and I think I have good reason to be, about Donald […]

[…] by pointing out that Trump met with two of the biggest antivaccine “icons” there are: Andrew Wakefield and, just last week, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. RFK Jr. even claimed that Trump asked him to chair a […]

[…] it was ultimately retracted. Unfortunately, President Trump’s antivaccine views led him to meet with Andrew Wakefield in August and led Wakefield to attend the Inaugural Ball with Gary Kompothecras, the wealthy […]

In all my anxiety stemming from this horrible new Trump status of America, I couldn’t find one reason to like him…I searched and searched for something good about Trump -nothing. Until just now! Thank you for this article. Finally, I agree with Trump on something. I wonder what a smart person would say about you calling Trump/Wakefield a name that, instead, was your own unconscious truth slipping out for the 2nd time, the 1st being when you named yourself Orac, you Quack? Can we at least laugh at your Freudian slip moment? Or, don’t you see it occurred? Factoring in the cliche’ ‘it takes one to know one’, the probability is that you don’t. And, by the way, science or critical thinking aren’t your “thang”. Tata dummy

[…] by the appointment of anthropogenic global climate change denialists in positions of power, meeting with antivaccinationists like Andrew Wakefield and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., appointing a member of a crank medical […]

[…] they think they have one of their own there, given that Trump has met with antivaccine activists Andrew Wakefield and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. As a result, they are furiously petitioning the Trump administration […]